This is a pretty great, long form post about the structure of Bluesky, and how it’s largely kinda pretending to be decentralized at the moment. I’m not trying to make a dig at it. I’ve enjoyed the platform myself for a while, but it’s good to learn more about how it actually works.
This article was shared on Mastodon via its author here.
It’s not.
I’m not even sure it can, unless they want to pay server operators. Who would do that for free for a for-profit company? And if they’re ultimately supported by the top, they’re still centralized.
Not that it’s super expensive to run a server, but it ain’t free; at least in a place like the Fediverse, every transaction is voluntary all the way down to the financial support, because any part may choose to participate or leave as they see fit.
I don’t see how BlueSky can replicate that and still chase profit.
I thought I read something that said one of the servers or services or something was already like 4.8 terabytes and growing by the day.
Presently? Hardly at all. It is interesting that a private Corp is even seriously playing with building a decentralized platform, I guess.
The files are out there to host your own server but from the short look I took it’s pretty involved. Most people with the knowledge and interest to host their own twitter-like server have probably already started a mastodon instance.
It reminds me of what Google tried to do initially with Google+. They copied Diaspora’s concept of aspects, calling them “circles”. Over time, though, using the circles became more and more janky until they removed them entirely. Then, of course, Google+ got shuttered completely over security issues.
Likewise, “federation” and “decentralization” are the new hotness in social networks, so here’s a big corporation looking to cash in on that. Of course, real decentralization would take too much power away from the corporation, so they have to half-ass it somehow.
I’m staying on Lemmy and off Bluesky.
I seek and spread knowledge from/to helpful lemmings and not interested in another Twitter wannabe gossip app, hopping on the “decentralized” train to grain traction.
This gossip app is meant for artists and other internet celebrities that think they are cool making their opinions to be fact. Extreme left is insufferable right now as a moderate. They have tripled down in all the worst ways which makes it annoying and frustrating to ignore.
I always liked reddit better since people actually discussed real things. Since I jumped ship to lemmy I feel even less inclined to bother with anything else. However reddit was way better for certain stuff like artists or creators.
Yes Ive been on bsky since early this year and really enjoyed it until everyone on the platform started kicking up dust over the election completely overreacting and spazzing out spewing the most idiotic things about identity politics, third party voters, trump being hitler, fascists it just lost all meaning. I used to be democrat and now consider myself moderate at this point and I just cant stomach following those kind of people anymore.
Not to mention childish adding labels on everyone and blocklists to decent people just completely power tripping cancel culture x10. Then all of a sudden I feel like its twitter all over again and I become incredibly annoyed at myself thinking it would ever change. Microblogging is so fucking stupid.
I always liked reddit better since people actually discussed real things.
People on Reddit do circlejerks about their feeling of “actually discussing real things”, except it’s only a feeling.
It’s a bit like with printed media in societies that saw rapid growth of literacy, people literate in the first generation would trust anything printed as if it were solid fact. And many people still trust anything printed and kinda official as if it were fact and think that being critical of that is backwards and worth irony. It’s really impossible to talk to such.
In this case - the Web has mostly moved to formats disadvantaging any exchange of normal texts, and things like Reddit (or Lemmy) seem, for people not used to that, automatically better for nuanced opinions. They are not.
Just like you can print any text, My Struggle and Elders of Sion and The Capital included, you can make any bullshit look appealing on Reddit with sufficiently eloquent or smart-looking text.
FFS, people actually reading books and writing something knew this since before Gutenberg. How did we even come to this miserable situation.
Reddit was hated and still is hated because people actually challenged eachothers views (mostly) constructively while also organizing and fighting for change when possible. Upvoting, downvoting, commenting, and engaging all equally mattered. Until one day spez and all the reddit mods decided to let their platform eat shit.
There were places that circlejerked, no doubt about it, but what everyone fails to realize is that reddit was a place for pretty much everyone. So if you thought that subreddit was a circlejerk, feel free to join or make a different one. Like open source software getting forked.
All these different social medias want us to be trapped in some sort of bubble through the illusion of choice. The short character limit is also what causes these sites to always be inferior to places like reddit and lemmy whether they like it or not. No one has a chance to fully expand on what they actually think or cite sources instead of being blasted immediately after their first post by getting blocked, cancelled, or moderated to oblivion.
I’m probably not going to read the article. But there’s currently just one bluesky instance, so it’s 100% centralized, not decentralized at all.
Jack was talking about the “protocol” at one point… I don’t think that matters at all right now. It’s just another social media site!
That’s a really interesting read (and worth much more attention than the pithy one-liners of people who just want to read the title).
On reflection, I think my take away is that Bluesky will always by necessity of its design be hosted and controlled by a single centralised company. But what their architectural model does allow is the possibility of a wholesale migration from one centralised provider to another. That is, it would be possible for a suitably resourced and motivated company to host its own mirror Relay and other components and have essentially a fully functional Bluesky clone. In the event that Bluesky ever “does a Twitter” and go into terminal decline, in theory this might mean that a successor/competitor could emerge and take on the network without loss of existing content.
I’m not sure that’ll ever actually happen, but it’s an interesting thought.
Interesting point, and shows that most likely, any instance of Bkuesky will eventually go Twitter
