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Bluesky Is Not Decentralized

beige.party

11–20 of 209 posts

Re: Bluesky Is Not Decentralized

#11

Not sure how it is better than Threads. At least Meta is delivering on their promise to integrate with Mastodon and move us closer to decentralised social networks.

Bluesky integrates with Mastodon better than Threads does at this point. I have bidirectional conversations with mastodon users, with notifications, using a bridge called BridgyFed. I can follow Mastodon users on Bluesky. I can’t with Threads.

Re: Bluesky Is Not Decentralized

#12
Bluesky's marketing is rather annoying on my opinion. They're not defederated in practice and they probably never will be, but that's okay. People don't want a new Mastodon, they want a new Twitter after Musk fucked that up worse than ever.

Their promises of portability may ring empty but so far their lack of AI algorithm and ad feeds are what people actually come to Bluesky for

If you want federation, ActivityPub is there and ready to go. You could probably hack together a bidirectional Bluesky Mastodon bridge without too much effort (requiring an account on BS to post from Mastodon) and enjoy the portability of your main account while also being able to follow your friends and such on BS.

Re: Bluesky Is Not Decentralized

#13
> BlueSky's big claim is [they have] "no algorithm".

https://bsky.social/about/blog/3-30-2023-algorithmic-choice Over a year ago, a blog claiming the opposite

> But the actual BlueSky app does not implement DIDs. It's called "did-placeholder" on their github. It's a stub. It's TBD. It's not a feature, it's a feature request.

AFAIK People with did:web dids can make accounts and use bluesky

> And guess who just bought a seat on BlueSky's board with a $15M Series A round? That's right, a crypto vulture named Blockchain Capital.

And one of the first investors was Jack Dorsey. They've used libraries and concepts that are only vogue amongst those with cryptography/cryptocurrency interests. This is not new, this is always been the case.

- - -

A person, any person, can join the relevant developer chats, or find and ask people who are working on or have brought up their own servers, about how centralized or decentralized bsky is, but that does not seem to be the case for this person's research.

Re: Bluesky Is Not Decentralized

#14

Unfortunately close to nobody on or has moved to Bluesky cares about it being decentralized, they just want another Twitter that just works. Most of the people on Bluesky that have moved are artists, academics, writers and creative folks that don't care about tech. If they did care about decentralization they would be all going to Mastodon right now, but there isn't any traction there in the millions.

Outside of tech circles I think that’s generally true. Few people understand what it means for something to be decentralised and fewer people are idealistic enough to care if it means compromising on features.

It’s all about the user experience. See also privacy and security.

Re: Bluesky Is Not Decentralized

#15

Unfortunately close to nobody on or has moved to Bluesky cares about it being decentralized, they just want another Twitter that just works. Most of the people on Bluesky that have moved are artists, academics, writers and creative folks that don't care about tech. If they did care about decentralization they would be all going to Mastodon right now, but there isn't any traction there in the millions.

Bluesky = 13m users, Mastodon = 9m users. Bluesky hasn't released what their DAU/MAUs are but Mastodon's aren't that bad. https://bsky.social/about/blog/10-24-2024-series-a https://mastodon-analytics.com

Dunno, this account[0] says Mastodon has 15.5m users, says it pulls from https://instances.social/ .. no clue how reliable/accurate their data is though.

[0] https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount/11327098336778135...

Re: Bluesky Is Not Decentralized

#16

Unfortunately close to nobody on or has moved to Bluesky cares about it being decentralized, they just want another Twitter that just works. Most of the people on Bluesky that have moved are artists, academics, writers and creative folks that don't care about tech. If they did care about decentralization they would be all going to Mastodon right now, but there isn't any traction there in the millions.

Close to nobody should need to understand what decentralisation means. This was/is a problem with Mastodon. When it was new it required understanding things most people didn’t want to know and arguably shouldn’t need to know.

Re: Bluesky Is Not Decentralized

#18

Unfortunately close to nobody on or has moved to Bluesky cares about it being decentralized, they just want another Twitter that just works. Most of the people on Bluesky that have moved are artists, academics, writers and creative folks that don't care about tech. If they did care about decentralization they would be all going to Mastodon right now, but there isn't any traction there in the millions.

Bluesky = 13m users, Mastodon = 9m users. Bluesky hasn't released what their DAU/MAUs are but Mastodon's aren't that bad. https://bsky.social/about/blog/10-24-2024-series-a https://mastodon-analytics.com

Bluesky has 1.43M daily active users on average and 6M monthly actives.

https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.d...

Mastodon has dropped to 800K monthly actives and has no data on daily actives which I would assume that number would be even lower.

Not a good look for Mastodon, considering that huge drop of 400K monthly users on that active users chart and did not recover even after Elon's changes to X, the majority of X users in Brazil chose Bluesky and ignored Mastodon.

Re: Bluesky Is Not Decentralized

#19
post #3

Read this: https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers AT Protocol works like the Web, where each user is a website and each application is a search engine. The apps crawl the network of hosts and aggregate activity. We have over 100 outside hosts and at least 3 aggregating apps out there. It’s a different model than ActivityPub, which is more akin to email. We never said no algorithm. I don’t know whe…

The OP does not take issue with the algorithm part, but the claim of decentralization. I'm currently running my own instance of an ActivityPub server (GoToSocial), just for me, and it works like a charm. I would not know how to do the same with BlueSky, and I have tried to understand how.

Re: Bluesky Is Not Decentralized

#20

Unfortunately close to nobody on or has moved to Bluesky cares about it being decentralized, they just want another Twitter that just works. Most of the people on Bluesky that have moved are artists, academics, writers and creative folks that don't care about tech. If they did care about decentralization they would be all going to Mastodon right now, but there isn't any traction there in the millions.

95% of end users don't care; but Bluesky has the right bits built in anyway. There's a grand central aggregator of all 13 million accounts, but it's not _special_, someone else could run one (several hobbiests are processing this level of data). Migration works* (and works better than Mastodon, all your history and network move even better than a masto server move) (*okay, it's a weird command line tool at the moment, but as soon as someone cares that'll get cleaned up). You can run your own Personal Data Server and hook it in to the bsky network and then everyone can see your posts and interact with them. It's newer, only a couple years old, but all the right parts are headed in the right direction.
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