Bluesky is more open than you think.
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Well, that problem also exists with mastodon.social and a lot of the actual fediverse.
Its less decentralised, but its still distributed.That's at a very different level. With dot social it's about a quarter of the active users on the fediverse, whereas bluesky is probably something like 95% centralized in practice. It seems to keep improving, but right now it's basically impossible to use without mostly interacting with bsky.
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Mastodon is more open than you think.
You made a post to attempt to dispell what you consider a misunderstanding about BlueSky, yet your comment suggests you dont understand the Fediverse.
Well, that problem also exists with mastodon.social
No, it doesn't. There are thousands of instances, some with hundreds of thousands of users. If you sort the instance list by active users, the population spreads out even more, because smaller instances have more active users.
and a lot of the actual fediverse.
Wrong again. Lemmy.world is about 30% of Lemmy, and less when you include Mbin, PieFed, etc.
Its less distributed, but its still decentralised.
I run a Fedi instance connected to hundreds of others. If one, even a large one, defederates me, it does not cut me off. If I ran a PDS, I'd be connected to BlueSky, and they can do what they want.
You are rationalizing this to yourself because you like BlueSky.
You're misinterpreting my comment, I said that getting cut off a large server is a problem in any network. The problem is worse on bluesky, but that can change.
If I run a PDS, I connect to bluesky and other instances as well. I can get cut off bluesky's server, but there is other servers.I'm not rationalising anything, I just think the discourse around bluesky is toxic, and I want to at least make it less annoying.
I don't even like bluesky, I do like the underlying protocol though. -
That's at a very different level. With dot social it's about a quarter of the active users on the fediverse, whereas bluesky is probably something like 95% centralized in practice. It seems to keep improving, but right now it's basically impossible to use without mostly interacting with bsky.
I know, but that wasn't my point. Getting cut off by a large server is a problem in any network.
Yes, its bad that bluesky controls most of atproto, but its possible to use atproto without bluesky. -
Still is. Always will be.
I really hate this attitude.
Most people who are against bluesky don't even care about an open internet or whatever, they just want their protocol to win or whatever.
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Good to hear!
The main difference is still that every work put into Bluesky.social can not be reused by other "servers", unlike Lemmy
I'm not quite sure what you mean here to be honest.
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I really hate this attitude.
Most people who are against bluesky don't even care about an open internet or whatever, they just want their protocol to win or whatever.
Sure seems like that's what you're doing. Notice how no one is against ATProto. Your post title is about BlueSky, not about ATProto.
We don't care about the protocol, despite what you think. Your average Lemmy user isn't on a standards body. We care about the network it facilitates.
Volunteers run the Fediverse, keeping it open. The former Twitter CEO runs BlyeSky. Want to start an actual open network running ATProto? Go for it.
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Sure seems like that's what you're doing. Notice how no one is against ATProto. Your post title is about BlueSky, not about ATProto.
We don't care about the protocol, despite what you think. Your average Lemmy user isn't on a standards body. We care about the network it facilitates.
Volunteers run the Fediverse, keeping it open. The former Twitter CEO runs BlyeSky. Want to start an actual open network running ATProto? Go for it.
I don't think you should be critising bluesky when you don't even know who the CEO is.
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You're misinterpreting my comment, I said that getting cut off a large server is a problem in any network. The problem is worse on bluesky, but that can change.
If I run a PDS, I connect to bluesky and other instances as well. I can get cut off bluesky's server, but there is other servers.I'm not rationalising anything, I just think the discourse around bluesky is toxic, and I want to at least make it less annoying.
I don't even like bluesky, I do like the underlying protocol though.No I'm not, you're just hot-swapping between ATProto and BlueSky, cherry picking the best parts of whichever to suit the debate. See: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/47335289/19626444
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No I'm not, you're just hot-swapping between ATProto and BlueSky, cherry picking the best parts of whichever to suit the debate. See: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/47335289/19626444
No, because you said bluesky is run by Jack dorsey, and you're critising bluesky, not atproto, like you said.
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I'm not quite sure what you mean here to be honest.
If the Lemmy devs implement a feature, all Lemmy instances can update and get that feature.
Based on what you are saying, the people behind atproto.africa have to implement their own alternative to the Bluesky appview (I guess because they can't reuse Bluesky.social code?)
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If the Lemmy devs implement a feature, all Lemmy instances can update and get that feature.
Based on what you are saying, the people behind atproto.africa have to implement their own alternative to the Bluesky appview (I guess because they can't reuse Bluesky.social code?)
No, they just want to develop it themselves so they have no reliance on bluesky.
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I see a lot of misinformation about bluesky here, so I want to address a lot of the talking points against atproto/bluesky.
This is partially inspired by accounts like mastodon migration and feditips being really annoying about bluesky.
How Bluesky Works
I see a lot of people misunderstanding how it works.
The network has three main parts:- A PDS -- This stands for Personal Data Server. These store information in records, like who you are following, your posts, who you are blocking and your images.
- A relay -- These crawl PDSes and keep a copy of all the records on them. They give a "Firehose" of all the data on the network (that they crawled).
- An AppView -- These index and work through the data from the firehose. All interactions are handled through these, meaning if someone follows me on bluesky, that
app.bsky.graph.followrecord will be crawled by the relay, and recieved by the AppView. https://bsky.app/ is an Appview. Appviews don't always have to use the relays, https://whtwnd.com/ connects to PDSes directly.
This is different to ActivityPub, where if I follow someone, my server sends that information directly to the other person's server.
Common misconceptions
An atproto relay is too expensive to run.
https://atproto.africa/ is a second full-network relay run by the blacksky team. We already have a second relay, and they're not even that expensive to run anymore, a lot of people run non-archival (meaning it doesn't backfill every post) relays for less than $40 a month.
There is no instances available except for bsky.social
bsky.social isn't actually an instance, its just the domain name assigned to users by default. This is explained here: https://app.wafrn.net/fediverse/post/f8fc8da8-cd7e-4fae-a895-ac59dc28088f
Wafrn has (opt-in) bluesky support, they act as a PDS and AppView, so if bluesky disappears tomorrow they can switch to the atproto.africa relay. (There is DID:PLC which is a problem, but I'll get to that later.)
You can't defederate bsky.social, this proves atproto is centralised!
https://app.wafrn.net/fediverse/post/f8fc8da8-cd7e-4fae-a895-ac59dc28088f also explains this, bsky.social is just the name assigned to users, each PDS has names like https://brittlegill.us-west.host.bsky.network/ (where my account is).
While you could ignore records from a specific PDS on the App layer, its pretty pointless, since atproto is portable/content addressed, meaning a user could seamlessly move to another PDS. (AP does support moving, but its pretty seamful.)
(While I was writing this someone posted a pretty good blogpost about this: https://blog.cyrneko.eu/there-is-no-bsky-social-instance)
Bluesky can censor people in turkey, this proves they're centralised!
Those posts weren't removed, people on third party bluesky apps in turkey could still see them.
People in Turkey are automatically subscribed to a Moderation Service which hides those posts, as the government requires it.
If a person unsubscribes, or uses a third party app/server the posts are still there.Bluesky isn't decentralised as someone was banned for pointing out the head of T&S liked jailbait porn.
That person came back on a different PDS. They literally are still on bluesky because they joined a different server.
Bluesky went down due to a DDoS, this proves they are centralised!
The DDoS only crashed the Bluesky PDSes. People self hosting were fine.
Wafrn
Wafrn is a federated tumblr alternative. It started off as a tumblr clone, the dev added AP support, and eventually, Atproto support.
Its a great example of how bluesky can be built on.
If bluesky disappeared tomorrow, Wafrn could switch relays to atproto.africa, and still interact with people on other PDSes.
AppViewLite
appviewlite is a cool project I forgot to mention in the original post. It lets you self host an extremely lightweight Appview.
You can crawl PDSes yourself, eliminating the need for a relay.
https://github.com/alnkesq/AppViewLiteThe main reason I made this post is because so many people are blindly anti-atproto, without fully understanding how it works and how it can be improved.
There is obviously problems with it, but it does a lot right. (There's a lot ActivityPub should do, like content addressing, DIDs and composable moderation).
I also think we could do with a better bridge. bridgy isn't really cutting it right now.
Note on did:plc, its the only centralised part of the network as of now, its essentially the underlying ID every account has. It is possible to use a did:web id instead, which is tied to a website name.
wrote last edited by [email protected]There are only 15,000 out of 36 Million users that are on servers not owned by Bluesky.
99.96% of users being on one instance isn't Decentralised even if the technology supports it in theory.
If 99.96% of users were on lemmy.world, I wouldn't call lemmy decentralised even if the technology allows it in theory.🧮 Decentralization Scoring System (v1.3)
Breakdown (Estimates)Platform Score Visualization 
Email95 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 
Lemmy79 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 
Mastodon74 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟣 PeerTube 94 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 
Pixelfed42 🟧🟧🟧🟧🟧🟧🟧🟧 
Bluesky14 🟥🟥🟥 🟥 Reddit 3 🟥 -
I hope I am not adding to the problem here as well. It seems that obviously Bluesky is neither fully centralized nor fully decentralized. Is there a statement about just how much of either it is?
Although that might be complicated - like someone could say that Lemmy is fairly centralized, bc if you block Lemmy.World then you lose half the users and perhaps half the communities (and PieFed even more so, with PieFed.social representing an even higher fraction of users and communities on it).
So there is a distinction between Bluesky the service as it currently is implemented and Bluesky the protocol, the former of which is fairly centralized but the latter is more expandable?
~99.96% of all Bluesky users and content is on Bluesky servers.
Bluesky is decentralised in theory, but in reality it is not. Until one entity doesn't own over 90% of the users and content, I really can't see how it can be seen as decentralised.
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I agree with you there.
I wish they put a bit more effort into getting people onto independant servers.
They took to opposite approch of mastodon: they abandoned proper distribution for better growth.In any case, ActivityPub and atproto can both coexist.
wrote last edited by [email protected]They are slowly making their way towards becoming another "Big Tech" company, they play nice with their users etc. now while they are still growing. Just like YouTube, Instagram, Facebook etc. did in the beginning, but eventually they will pick profit over their users.
I just don't trust them enough to actually follow through with becoming Decentralised and giving up controlling over 99% of users.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralization
Decentralization or decentralisation is the process by which the activities of an organization, particularly those related to planning and decision-making, are distributed or delegated away from a central, authoritative location or group and given to smaller factions within it -
~99.96% of all Bluesky users and content is on Bluesky servers.
Bluesky is decentralised in theory, but in reality it is not. Until one entity doesn't own over 90% of the users and content, I really can't see how it can be seen as decentralised.
It's not a matter of how many users, but whether those users have the option to switch servers. By the former standard, mastodon would be considered centralized simply because of mastodon.social.
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It's not a matter of how many users, but whether those users have the option to switch servers. By the former standard, mastodon would be considered centralized simply because of mastodon.social.
In theory Bluesky users have the option to switch, but in practice they don't
36 Million users can't just switch to other servers only catering for ~15,000 users.mastodon.social has ~30% of the active users, which is a lot, but if it went down Mastodon would continue working for most users.
You can't compare the 99.96% market share Bluesky has with that.
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There are only 15,000 out of 36 Million users that are on servers not owned by Bluesky.
99.96% of users being on one instance isn't Decentralised even if the technology supports it in theory.
If 99.96% of users were on lemmy.world, I wouldn't call lemmy decentralised even if the technology allows it in theory.🧮 Decentralization Scoring System (v1.3)
Breakdown (Estimates)Platform Score Visualization Email95 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Lemmy79 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Mastodon74 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟣 PeerTube 94 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Pixelfed42 🟧🟧🟧🟧🟧🟧🟧🟧 Bluesky14 🟥🟥🟥 🟥 Reddit 3 🟥 Define decentralised.
As per RFC 9518: Centralization, Decentralization, and Internet Standards,[...] "centralization" is the state of affairs where a single entity or a small group of them can observe, capture, control, or extract rent from the operation or use of an Internet function exclusively.
[Decentralization is when] "complete reliance upon a single point is not always required" (citing Baran, 1964)
[...] federation, i.e., designing a function in a way that uses independent instances that maintain connectivity and interoperability to provide a single cohesive service.
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It's not a matter of how many users, but whether those users have the option to switch servers. By the former standard, mastodon would be considered centralized simply because of mastodon.social.
PDS migration works way better on atproto, and objects are portable, unlike on AP.
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Is there any way to connect the bsky android app to the atproto.africa relay or a third party appview that uses the atproto.africa relay? I wouldn't mind using bsky more if there was a clone of the android app that doesn't use the bsky relay/appview. Looking at whtwnd it appears to be just web and not native apps?
I would like to host my own PDS and access bsky through a native app using third party relay+appview, but I haven't seen a way to do this yet.
Actually, take a look at AppViewLite, it lets you skip relays and crawl PDSes directly. Its fairly lightweight as well, so you could host it alongside a PDS.
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PDS migration works way better on atproto, and objects are portable, unlike on AP.
@irelephant
Genuine question, then: why is hardly anybody hosting their own Bluesky server?
