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.
What? It’s just a clone of X that is anti-X. It’s not decentralized at all, it’s Twitter for the original blue check people only, and they’re already eating each other alive in there.
What’s funny is that the only shit people get from DeCeNtRaLiZaTioN is inconvenience and dying engagement.
Incorrect. That’s the only thing people notice. The benefit is not having one central authority in control. If Bluesky decides to, for some reason, not allow third-party apps or something, there’s no way to prevent it. If Lemmy.world, for example, does this then they don’t have the authority to enforce it.
The benefit of federation is in removing hierarchy that can harm the platform without the consent of its users. It’s invisible because it’s only preventing something. This does not mean it isn’t beneficial though.
“Removing hierarchy”. Lol what? The instance owner is boss of the instance. Are you suggesting it’s different just because here it is a totally reliable* leftist* dude in the Internet who decides what to do instead of… A random guy who owns a company?
What happens when the money runs out and you face the reality that running a platform is a business, not a hobby? As has been happening with many instances lately.
The instance owner owns the instance, but it’s limited to that. That is the minimum level possible. There has to be a server somewhere. On Lemmy you can always leave for another instance or start your own. On Reddit your options are to do what the company wants or leave the entire site. You can’t just log into a different server.
If you want a decentralize Twitter clone. Mastodon is the only pick.
Let’s be real, most instances suck. Can’t search, can’t see how many interactions a post had. It’s not the same experience
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 saw a comment the other day about this saying you’d need like over 4terrabytes of storage to run a BlueSky instance of your own, and that it’s growing every day. That’s fucking insane.
I thought it takes that much storage to run a relay, not an instance. (Which Bluesky calls a “Personal Data Store.”)
Maybe this is just my ignorance showing, but this seems like a really archaic way to design something like this in 2024. Dump all the data into a central repository and then have clients pull from that?
Bluesky (well, atproto, bluesky is the twitter clone running on atproto as a demo app) doesn’t actually have instances in the mastodon sense, it’s a more modular design for better scaling (because it was designed from the start to replace twitter)
Here’s a good article with illustrations https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers
That’s addressed in the blog post. She was saying it was currently 5TB and growing. So anyone wanting to set up a server would need to pay for that space, and that’s not cheap.
It’s also not, like, unattainable
But it’s definitely well beyond what any hobbyist is going to set up in a whim
