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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"

#61

Post by meltyness »

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.)

I wouldn't be so dismissive of the importance when people succumb to the realization that it's like VHS/Betamax, but instead of Bruce Willis in Die Hard, at stake is literally half of your friends and acquaintances.

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

#62

Post by myaccountonhn »

brap wrote: post #60
myaccountonhn wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people are starting to care more and more. People are using Mastodon, many are switching to Bluesky believing it is decentralized. If you teach people why they should care, I believe many actually do care. Many users just don't know enough to make a choice.

Which people? The kind who browse HN? Bluesky is only getting some attention now from people outside of tech because Musk is disliked and it’s basically the only alternative. I assure you most of them don’t know or care what “decentralized” means.

I know plenty who know and care that are not in the HN crowd.

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

#63

Post by joejoo »

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…

[dead]

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

#64

Post by rglullis »

dingnuts wrote: post #55
rglullis wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought I had it (mostly) solved with fediverser: users would go to one place, sign up with OAuth to the service they wanted to leave (Reddit, Twitter...) and the system would behind the scenes create an account on any of the participating instances. In doing so, it could leverage the user existing information (subreddits subscribed, users followed on Twitter) and find the corresponding subreddits/users that are al…

> Turns out the biggest challenge was not in getting users, but in convincing admins to join the network The incentives for homeserver admins are extremely perverted and it's why the Mastodon network in particular is so dominated by ideological cliques. Running a homeserver is thankless, laborious, and expensive, and the costs go up with each user. There's no money for it, so admins have to be compensated another way…

> The financial story has to be solved

You are preaching to the converted. :) [0]

I might be wrong, but I think that my instance was the first to provide accounts only to paying subscribers, and even today there are only 2 others like mine.

[0] https://mastodon.communick.com/@raphael/114365227998082545

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

#65

Post by aspenmayer »

cranberryturkey wrote: post #25
irusensei wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

Nostr is super flexible too since its a protocol. I see reddit-style and hacker news style sites, documentation sites, blog sites...and yes twitter/x style sites as well. Hell there's even a streaming platform on nostr too. The common criticism is that its all bitcoiners, that's mainly because it uses Lightning Network for zaps and that's how people get paid in nostr. So naturally its a lot of bitcoiners in the nostr…

That sounds really interesting. I haven’t really kept up with nostr. Would you mind linking some examples of the types of sites you mentioned?

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

#66

Post by anon7000 »

Meekro wrote: post #15
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.)

Definitely agree that centralized services have a lot of advantages. Bluesky deserves some criticism for trying to have their cake and eat it too, though. They told a good story about being decentralized, and lots of people repeated it while ignoring technical experts pointing out it's not true. Even on HN, the claim that they're decentralized was repeated a lot.

No. This isn’t true. Bluesky has always been very transparent about exactly what flavor of decentralization they offer. The whole thing is swappable microservices you can host yourself, including the relay if you really care. The relay is an optimization to make their app offering work in a performant, scalable way.

The relay is described here and here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.03239, https://atproto.com/guides/glossary#relay

The protocol Bluesky is built on is certainly decentralized. It’s really fucking annoying that people act like it’s not “real” decentralization, when in fact it’s just a different flavor of decentralization on the technical level compared to, say, the fediverse.

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

#67

Post by anon7000 »

baxuz wrote: post #22
Meekro wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely agree that centralized services have a lot of advantages. Bluesky deserves some criticism for trying to have their cake and eat it too, though. They told a good story about being decentralized, and lots of people repeated it while ignoring technical experts pointing out it's not true. Even on HN, the claim that they're decentralized was repeated a lot.

Exactly. There's a lot of dogmatic hype with atproto, which is kinda giving me early crypto/NFT vibes. Any discussions or criticisms are quickly snuffed out or labeled as toxic or uninformed, or devolve into whataboutism. A lot of the content on bluesky, but especially in its early days, is about how the protocol is great, its potential and what bright future it will lead us into. Their main investors are a crypto br…

Ironically, your whole comment is whataboutism.

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

#68

Post by rafram »

sitzkrieg wrote: post #59
rafram wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

this is a fediverse issue. mastodon is a client

Pedantry.

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

#70

Post by cranberryturkey »

aspenmayer wrote: post #65
cranberryturkey wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nostr is super flexible too since its a protocol. I see reddit-style and hacker news style sites, documentation sites, blog sites...and yes twitter/x style sites as well. Hell there's even a streaming platform on nostr too. The common criticism is that its all bitcoiners, that's mainly because it uses Lightning Network for zaps and that's how people get paid in nostr. So naturally its a lot of bitcoiners in the nostr…

That sounds really interesting. I haven’t really kept up with nostr. Would you mind linking some examples of the types of sites you mentioned?

https://github.com/aljazceru/awesome-nostr
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