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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"

#41

Post by rollcat »

rwmj wrote: post #38
rollcat wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email has solved federation / decentralisation long before WWW. Nobody is confused when you hand them a user@gmail.com, user@hotmail.com, etc; I use my own user@whatever.com and sometimes get a blank stare, until people realise you can go to www.gmail.com to check your own inbox, and you can totally just type www.whatever.com into your browser. Links like reddit.com/u/user, youtube.com/@user, already exist and are de…

It's funny you mention gmail and hotmail. That's exactly my point. Who is setting up their own email server when they could instead sign up for one of those? Is it even 1 in 100,000 email users? (I say this as someone running my own email server, who periodically has problems sending to gmail.)

> Who is setting up their own email server when they could instead sign up for one of those?

About the same number of people who set up their own WWW server, modulo the absolute PITA that is email.

Still, federation between GMail, Hotmail, iCloud, Yahoo, ProtonMail, etc does work. You don't have as many choices but it can still feel overwhelming if you're shopping for an alternative. People at Corp & Co use their @corpnco.com addresses daily. My personal email is connected to iCloud, but I can always point my MX elsewhere. Running your own Mastodon instance is costly - however fediverse already leans on smaller interconnecting communities.

Nobody sets up an AS just to run some fiber to their home. Decentralisation and federation just happen at different levels and scales.

Re: Apparently Bluesky has one centralized service, the "relay"

#42

Post by rafram »

rwmj wrote: post #9

Haven'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.)

Yup. Mastodon has this issue. Can’t pick a big generic instance because it could get defederated for spam/being too normie; can’t pick a small instance because it could get defederated over some ridiculous drama [1][2].

Normal people (and even some not-normal people) don’t want to deal with that. “Instances” are a bad model.

[1]: https://tootworld.social/@lilythelonelygirl/1143999833553083...

[2]: https://tau-ceti.space/@lo__@mastodon.social/114394202556951...

Re: Apparently Bluesky has one centralized service, the "relay"

#43

Post by poincaredisk »

madeofpalk wrote: post #29
baxuz wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decentralization doesn't really help, it only creates more bubbles. Reddit is extremely centralized, and you can find hundreds of subreddits that do cover Israel's ethnic cleansing. However, most popular subreddits are heavily censored, while the smaller communities become an echo chamber, and often get radicalized. Decentralized bubbles are still bubbles—even worse, since the barrier to entry is higher.

Giving users control over the bubble, rather than one company, is the important part.

Is it? How does it help with radicalization? If anything it makes it worse, since people on the extreme political spectrum will always try harder than the regulars, while companies care only about that sweet, sweet money that comes from being bland and attracting the masses.

Don't get me wrong, I care deeply about privacy and want a decentralized works, but it comes with its own cans of worms.

Re: Apparently Bluesky has one centralized service, the "relay"

#44

Post by yellowapple »

half-kh-hacker wrote: post #27
boramalper wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

plainly, free our feeds are grifting. the relay at this point is non-archival and can be spun up trivially. with a small sliding history window for subscriber catchup u can use like 32gb of scratch disk space and keep a few hours, the relay is literally just a subscribeRepos forwarder from PDSes. the AppView is vastly more expensive to run since you need to handle the write volume of all bsky activity. if you build a…

Re: the relay, that depends on your needs. My impression from these sorts of "run a relay on an RPi" projects is that they're only dealing with a subset of the full firehose Bluesky's relay has to deal with - be it a shorter timeline (as you mention) or only concerning themselves with specific accounts (like the relay operator's own "following" feed, in the case of someone running a personal relay) or what have you. Pretty sure even Bluesky's relay doesn't try to drink from the whole firehose (or if it does, it's tolerant of "dribbling" so to speak; I recall a Bluesky dev blog post about how temporarily dropping posts from users' feeds is acceptable if the relay can't keep up).

Re: write traffic, my understanding is that the appviews shift most (if not all) of that burden to the PDSes, no?

Re: Apparently Bluesky has one centralized service, the "relay"

#46

Post by madeofpalk »

poincaredisk wrote: post #43
madeofpalk wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Giving users control over the bubble, rather than one company, is the important part.

Is it? How does it help with radicalization? If anything it makes it worse, since people on the extreme political spectrum will always try harder than the regulars, while companies care only about that sweet, sweet money that comes from being bland and attracting the masses. Don't get me wrong, I care deeply about privacy and want a decentralized works, but it comes with its own cans of worms.

The goal for distributed moderation is not to prevent radicalization, but to prevent one rich man from controlling the content people see. As a user, I can opt into whether I want to see terfs or developers or movie spoilers online or not. I think it's important for users to have more tools and agency over their online experiences.

There are other factors in play though that I think help create less polarising and radical social networks - ability to create custom homepage feeds gives to more variety and less control by the platform maker to sway audiences. Non-commercial networks (which doesn't count Bluesky) have less incentives to juice engagement. More distributed networks have levers audiences can pull if the main developers steer the network in the wrong direction.

> since people on the extreme political spectrum will always try harder than the regulars

Imagine if anyone could create an alternate feed algorithm that penalises these try-hards which people could subscribe to and use instead of the default.

Re: Apparently Bluesky has one centralized service, the "relay"

#47

Post by jedimind »

poincaredisk wrote: post #43
madeofpalk wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Giving users control over the bubble, rather than one company, is the important part.

Is it? How does it help with radicalization? If anything it makes it worse, since people on the extreme political spectrum will always try harder than the regulars, while companies care only about that sweet, sweet money that comes from being bland and attracting the masses. Don't get me wrong, I care deeply about privacy and want a decentralized works, but it comes with its own cans of worms.

It's a good and necessary thing to become "radicalized" in order to prevent genocide and break out from the pacifying programming of the state. the state puts pressure on centralized social media companies to enact clever methods of censorship to pacify the masses for them. such companies might even just willingly self-censor in anticipation out of obedience or just plain uncritical acceptance of state department propaganda.

So the state and the ruling class produced a radicalization of the masses themselves where the status quo is to pretend that genocide is normal - a "zone of interest" type of effect is supposed to be part of what's "normal". While I agree with you that decentralization is not a silver bullet, because it can create pockets of echo chambers, it's still a good tool for communities to be independent from certain influences like from the state or corporate culture.

Re: Apparently Bluesky has one centralized service, the "relay"

#48

Post by [deleted] »

rwmj wrote: post #9

Haven'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.)

[deleted]

Re: Apparently Bluesky has one centralized service, the "relay"

#49

Post by wkat4242 »

rafram wrote: post #42
rwmj wrote: post #9

Haven'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.)

Yup. Mastodon has this issue. Can’t pick a big generic instance because it could get defederated for spam/being too normie; can’t pick a small instance because it could get defederated over some ridiculous drama [1][2]. Normal people (and even some not-normal people) don’t want to deal with that. “Instances” are a bad model. [1]: https://tootworld.social/@lilythelonelygirl/1143999833553083... [2]: https://tau-ceti.sp…

I don't think the instances themselves are the problem. It's rather the whole defederation mess. If this had been left in the users' own hands rather than the server operators, it wouldn't have been an issue.

After all email is very federated and it works fine. And people have no issue grokking it. The implementation matters.

Re: Apparently Bluesky has one centralized service, the "relay"

#50

Post by baxuz »

jedimind wrote: post #47
poincaredisk wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? How does it help with radicalization? If anything it makes it worse, since people on the extreme political spectrum will always try harder than the regulars, while companies care only about that sweet, sweet money that comes from being bland and attracting the masses. Don't get me wrong, I care deeply about privacy and want a decentralized works, but it comes with its own cans of worms.

It's a good and necessary thing to become "radicalized" in order to prevent genocide and break out from the pacifying programming of the state. the state puts pressure on centralized social media companies to enact clever methods of censorship to pacify the masses for them. such companies might even just willingly self-censor in anticipation out of obedience or just plain uncritical acceptance of state department pro…

I'm not singling out this kind of radicalization, but any kind, including alt-right, qanon, etc.

I'd say that inaccessible bubbles become echo chambers of people screaming into the void. The point is the be visible and heard, and federation does the opposite.

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