Apparently Bluesky has one centralized service, the "relay"
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Apparently Bluesky has one centralized service, the "relay"
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Re: Apparently Bluesky has one centralized service, the "relay"
#2Previously, related:
Wait, how did a decentralized service like Bluesky go down? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43789178 - April 2025 (2 comments)
Re: Apparently Bluesky has one centralized service, the "relay"
#3Use nostr. checkout primal.net
Re: Apparently Bluesky has one centralized service, the "relay"
#4It's possible to spin up alternative relays. For example: https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3kwzl7tye6u2y
The issue is that relays tend to require a lot more resources to operate than appviews and PDSes (though not necessarily as much as that blog post suggests; I recall posts of people running their own relays on RPi4s with NVMe drives), so it's common for alternative appviews to rely on Bluesky's relay instead of taking on the expense of spinning up a new one.
In any case, as that toot notes, the Bluesky outage was on a PDS level rather than a relay level. And thankfully it's much less expensive to run your own PDS; apparently those who do so weren't impacted.
Re: Apparently Bluesky has one centralized service, the "relay"
#5Use nostr. checkout primal.net
or activitypub ! Part of w3c, tons of servers and clients, even Meta runs an instance
I don't think it's as easy to run nostr relays as activitypub instances but maybe I am wrong. ActivityPub seems way more active than nostr also. Most of what I see on nostr is either cryptocurrency discussion or the kinds of alt-lite content you would find on Gab or Minds
Re: Apparently Bluesky has one centralized service, the "relay"
#6It's possible to spin up alternative relays. For example: https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3kwzl7tye6u2y The issue is that relays tend to require a lot more resources to operate than appviews and PDSes (though not necessarily as much as that blog post suggests; I recall posts of people running their own relays on RPi4s with NVMe drives), so it's common for alternative appviews to rely on Bluesky's relay instead of tak…
Genuine question: if it's so easy and cheap to host a relay, why then "Free Our Feeds" initiative [0] looking to raise $4,000,000 [1] to establish a second relay [2]? Most of that money must be earmarked for administrative and human expenses then, right?
[1] https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-us-free-social-media-from-bi...
[2] https://freeourfeeds.com/ § FAQ § What will the money be used for?
Re: Apparently Bluesky has one centralized service, the "relay"
#7Use nostr. checkout primal.net
or activitypub ! Part of w3c, tons of servers and clients, even Meta runs an instance I don't think it's as easy to run nostr relays as activitypub instances but maybe I am wrong. ActivityPub seems way more active than nostr also. Most of what I see on nostr is either cryptocurrency discussion or the kinds of alt-lite content you would find on Gab or Minds
Nostr relays are in essence extremely dumb websocket servers. The most popular relay software is nostr-rs-relay a single binary written in rust that automatically spins up an SQLite database.
Bitcoin discussion yes, but mostly because bitcoiners are avid self hosters. Cryptocurrency not much. The “crypto” people created their own thing if I’m not mistaken.
Nostr was spun out as a truly censorship resistant protocol so it’s a given people who distrusts both centralized services and island style moderation are there don’t you think?
dergigi once described Nostr with an analogy to a gay bar. The place is nice, the furniture is fancy, the drinks pleasant and the people who frequent it are mostly nice but if you are not gay you won’t stick for so long.
Nothing keeps you from creating a moderated relay or curate your feeds though.
One of the coolest things about Nostr IMO is how extendable the protocol is and how easy you can develop crazy stuff for it.
Ah and for some reason there are some Japanese users.
Re: Apparently Bluesky has one centralized service, the "relay"
#8It's possible to spin up alternative relays. For example: https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3kwzl7tye6u2y The issue is that relays tend to require a lot more resources to operate than appviews and PDSes (though not necessarily as much as that blog post suggests; I recall posts of people running their own relays on RPi4s with NVMe drives), so it's common for alternative appviews to rely on Bluesky's relay instead of tak…
Genuine question: if it's so easy and cheap to host a relay, why then "Free Our Feeds" initiative [0] looking to raise $4,000,000 [1] to establish a second relay [2]? Most of that money must be earmarked for administrative and human expenses then, right? [0] https://freeourfeeds.com/ [1] https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-us-free-social-media-from-bi... [2] https://freeourfeeds.com/ § FAQ § What will the money be used f…
Scale, its always question of scale. Whatever youncan easily and cheaply host yourself will likely be only good enough for you and your friends or family. Anything more will require more hardware and dedicated people for maintaining that hardware and software.
Re: Apparently Bluesky has one centralized service, the "relay"
#9Haven't we learned by now that approximately no one cares? Centralised services are vastly more popular than federated ones, the main reason being that they reduce the paradox / paralysis of choice when you're signing up for them. (Solve that problem properly and you may be on to something.)
Re: Apparently Bluesky has one centralized service, the "relay"
#10i don’t actively contribute to Bluesky nor Fedi (i do consume content from both), but it’s pretty frustrating to see BlueSky being argued into a centralized service for the recent downtime.
- The downtime was not relay level, but it was a PDS level. So the point is moot already.
- Because it was decentralized at the PDS level, the outage did not affect anyone with personal PDSes, which contains the data that you care about.
- Even if it was the relay level, relays aren’t centralized, anyone can spin up another relay (because everything on the relay is derived from PDS data). It’s just that it’s going to be pretty expensive and consume much resources. Which is a fair point, and might be argued that the network currently has a single big point of failure, but that doesn’t mean it’s centralized.
And then people now start arguing that the fact that BlueSky-hosted PDSes went down at the same time is now another proof that BlueSky is centralized?
That’s like arguing that Gmail can go down and all @gmail.com mail addresses won’t work, so email is centralized. Or AWS can have an outage and all AWS-powered websites will break down, so the web is centralized.
One can say that there’s a single big point of failure (which the BlueSky LLC is, just like AWS, Gmail, or the mastodon.social instance in the case of Fedi), but that doesn’t make the whole service centralized.