Isn’t Bluesky federated?
Pseudo-federated from what people are saying. Something about the user accounts being centralised but the data being decentralised. I don’t understand but it’s something funded by the previous owner of Twitter and full of other corporate money, so I wouldn’t trust it.
Jack Dorsey has nothing by to do with Bluesky and hasn’t for a while now.
Holy shit, Dorsey is eve fucking dumber than I could have ever imagined:
The Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has left the board of Bluesky, the decentralised social network he helped start, and encouraged users to remain on his first site, now owned by Elon Musk and called X.
Dorsey confirmed he had cut ties with Bluesky on Sunday, telling a user on X that he was no longer on the social network’s board. The announcement was apparently unexpected, since Bluesky still listed him as a board member until late on Sunday evening.
…
“Don’t depend on corporations to grant you rights,” Dorsey tweeted. “Defend them yourself using freedom technology. (you’re on one).”
there is a critical ‘relay’ component that only they control. so you can setup your own ‘node’, but only connected to their instance.
only a single instance of the relay exists and they are not releasing that code and a few other pieces. it federates only with itself.
That pretty much sounds centralised. But I guess people don’t care if they don’t have to worry about “picking a server” which is “too complicated” 🤷
In theory, yes / kind of.
In practice, no, not really.
It uses a different protocol (AT protocol) than the Fediverse ActivityPub protocol, which is what lemmy and mastadon and pixelfed are all built on, so it is not natively interoperable with ActivityPub based Fediverse.
To do that you have to use bridging software of some kind.
Also, as others have pointed out… even if you do make the approximate equivalent of your own instance, a PDS… all of these still go through ‘Relays’, which BlueSky controls.
So… it is technically federated in the sense that it allows for anyone to make their own instance/PDS… but ultimately it is actually totally centralized.
Instead of a web or weave of many to many connections of independent admins/maintainers, the structure much more resembles a top down hierarchy that is ultimately all controlled by a profit driven corporation.
If the Relays go down, everything goes down.
If BlueSky decides they don’t appreciate your instance, they have unitary power to delist or block it, from everyone.
As compared with the Fediverse, where many different instances and communities can all pick and choose for themselves which other instances and communities they do and do not federate with, and where an outage particular to one community/instance only bricks that particular community/instance.
In theory, yes. In practice, it’s a bit different. At the very least for now.
