Are we decentralized yet? • Hacker News Board

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#41

Post by cheeze » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 9:13 PM UTC

treyd wrote: post #33

Animats wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We haven't seen a distributed Google yet. It's not impossible, but each distributed component would have to be at least a small data center.

Google search does a lot more complex processing (crawling, historical weighting) and it does it on unstructured pages. Discoveravility in a microblogging system doesn't have to be a lot more than indexing/collation of structured posts, and end-user clients can be designed to participate in that. "Retweets"/"boosts" are already a form of that.

Sure, but fediverse numbers are pitiful at this point. Reality is that 99.9% of users don't care about decentralization, so it ends up being a "this has to work as well as a centralized system" does.

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#42

Post by 1oooqooq » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 9:13 PM UTC

mastodon is the equivalent of bsd code, but for user generated content.

Microsoft and apple would just reach for bsd tcp stack etc. today bluesky just "federate" to mastodon and instantly had millions of active users, until they don't need to federate anymore, when they will blame the other instances to not migrating to some crazy protocol or something, never they will just "shut the door".

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#43

Post by newsclues » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 9:14 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #8

Keep the needle pointing north. Towards the center of that dial. Too decentralized, and you can't find anything. Nobody uses it. Too centralized, and censorship takes over. Nobody can speak freely.

Informed Voluntary choice is what I want to see. Give me the option to pick, centralized, decentralized or hybrid balanced.

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#44

Post by alethic » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 9:14 PM UTC

skybrian wrote: post #34

torben-friis wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by consistent? (Never used the fediverse, so zero context here).

Not who you're replying to, but one issue is that different users will sometimes see a different subset of replies to a post, depending on what the server they're using has copied from other servers.

This isn't correct. Mastodon merged fetch-all-replies in March. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/32615

The only difference in visible replies is in the moderation choices of the server the post is viewed from.

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#45

Post by oncallthrow » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 9:15 PM UTC

msgilligan wrote: post #32

TIL about the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index and I wanted to test it with a weird corner-case that I remember. At one point in the late 1980's Microsoft had a GREATER than 100% market share of the Macintosh spreadsheet market. How is this possible? Market share (for a given period) is the participant's sales in the market divided by total sales. It just so happened that Lotus had more returns than sales of their failed s…

[flagged]

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#46

Post by hklgny » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 9:15 PM UTC

maxbond wrote: post #10

Animats wrote: post #8

Keep the needle pointing north. Towards the center of that dial. Too decentralized, and you can't find anything. Nobody uses it. Too centralized, and censorship takes over. Nobody can speak freely.

I don't disagree but I do wonder if a.) discoverability is really so intractable in a decentralized environment if you're willing to throw a lot of resources towards indexing and b.) if that middle ground isn't like balancing a pendulum upside down - a very fragile equilibrium. A bunch of decentralized units might join together, or a large centralized unit might fail, pushing the pendulum to either side. You can thin…

The fediverse folks are violently against any efforts for discoverability. They like the high bar for discovering and joining. Any attempt gets brigaded and shut down quickly

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#47

Post by throawayonthe » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 9:17 PM UTC

https://atproto.wiki/en/working-groups/indiesky/stack

multiple different levels of independence to be had in the atmosphere, so it's not directly comparable (doesn't help atmosphere's case though)

i personally am more excited about ATproto as a protocol, and hope https://freeourfeeds.com/ et al can pull it off

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#48

Post by danabramov » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 9:17 PM UTC

jchw wrote: post #36

skybrian wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't someone run another App View?

You can, it just won't be the Bluesky App View, so it's not really Bluesky. It's not like the fediverse where the instances own the URLs of the posts: they go through app views and there's a canonical URL to a Bluesky post and that's through the official app view.

This seems misleading.

Different AppViews would obviously be branded differently, but the whole point of ATProto is that there is a shared "picture" of the world. People are running alternative AppViews that consume Bluesky posts (and serve Bluesky threads).

Here's the same thread on three different AppViews:

- https://zeppelin.social/profile/did:plc:iyz5zf463ic52vqbonyu...

- https://blacksky.community/profile/did:plc:iyz5zf463ic52vqbo...

- https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:iyz5zf463ic52vqbonyu2ebu/po...

These are three independent webapps indexing the same information and serving it independently. They're not different frontends for one API; these are all independent backends.

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#49

Post by gary_0 » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 9:18 PM UTC

agilob wrote: post #9

jcims wrote: post #3

How would one measure old school federated contexts like IRC and NNTP in this way? I wonder would they would fare.

Remember how freenode changed owner and pretty much everyone moved away from it in less than 1 week? It was easy and possible.

It was a pretty huge disruption, though, even though the damage wasn't fatal.

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#50

Post by skybrian » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 9:19 PM UTC

alethic wrote: post #44

skybrian wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not who you're replying to, but one issue is that different users will sometimes see a different subset of replies to a post, depending on what the server they're using has copied from other servers.

This isn't correct. Mastodon merged fetch-all-replies in March. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/32615 The only difference in visible replies is in the moderation choices of the server the post is viewed from.

Good to know. Thanks for the update!