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Are we decentralized yet?

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Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#51

Post by baq »

blintz wrote: post #37

> This page measures the concentration of the Fediverse and the Atmosphere according to the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index (HHI), an indicator from economics used to measure competition between firms in an industry. Mathematically, HHI is the sum of the squares of market shares of all servers. I had not heard of this metric before - it’s neat and simple to understand. If you scaled it down to 0-100 (by dividing by 100),…

OTOH the reason why they didn't normalize to 100 may be to not give people an idea that the measure is linear; seeing a score of 2500 makes you ask 'what does it mean?' whereas if you were presented with 25/100 you probably wouldn't think that it is 'highly concentrated'.

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#52

Post by throawayonthe »

skybrian wrote: post #31
jchw wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In case of Bluesky, there will also only ever be a single instance of the App View. As far as I am aware though in practice there's really only the official relay or indexing services either.

Why can't someone run another App View?

there is https://deer.social

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#53

Post by DrewADesign »

wmf wrote: post #30
stebalien wrote: post #26

"Decentralization" isn't the end-goal so measuring it here isn't all that meaningful. Personally, I care about: 1. How hard is it to censor the network. 2. How hard would it be for some major player to enshittify the network. Furthermore, while the fediverse has a single axis for decentralization, BlueSky has 3: number of "big index servers", number of PDSs, number of domain names (how many people own their handle):…

BlueSky's primary defense against enshittification is user account portability. I wonder if people would actually migrate or if they'd just get boiled.

Depends on if they had something compelling to migrate to.

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#54

Post by danabramov »

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.

How does it work?

In ATProto, there is no need to do this on-demand because the data is already there in the AppView. When you want to serve a page of replies, you read them from the database and serve them. There is no distributed fetching involved, no need to hit someone else's servers, no need to coalesce them or worry about limiting fetches, etc. This is why it works fine for threads without thousands of replies and hundreds of nesting levels. It can also be paginated on the server.

If you don't have this information on your server, how can you gracefully fetch thousands of replies from different servers and present a cohesive picture during a single request? I'm sure this PR does an attempt at that but I'm not sure this is a direct comparison because Mastodon can't avoid doing this on-demand. If we're comparing, it would be good to list the tradeoffs of Mastodon's implementation (and how it scales to deep threads) more explicitly.

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#55

Post by [deleted] »

oncallthrow wrote: post #45
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]

[deleted]

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#56

Post by stavros »

oncallthrow wrote: post #45
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]

That's the beauty of software: It doesn't have a physical form, so you can buy it once but return it infinity times!

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#57

Post by msgilligan »

oncallthrow wrote: post #45
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]

> The only way that makes any sense is if you subtract returns for sales made in a different period to the sales period you are considering

Exactly. That's the way accounting works. They did not know in the previous quarter that the product would be returned in the following quarter, so they end up having negative sales in the current quarter.

Yes it produces "garbage output", which I find amusing.

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#58

Post by kyle-rb »

d4mi3n wrote: post #2

Neat! I'm not surprised at the findings here. BlueSky (for the average user) is pretty much a drop in replacement for Twitter. Despite the smaller total numbers in Mastadon, it's great to see that the ecosystem seems to be successfully avoiding centralization like we've seen in the AT-Proto ecosystem. I suspect that the cost of running AT proto servers/relays is prohibitive for smaller players compared to a Mastadon…

Running a PDS server for yourself and a few friends is not very expensive afaik, but there's also not much benefit to doing so, because the point of the PDS is to have a clean separation between your own data and the rest of the network.

The expensive things in ATProto are the Relay (crawls/listens to PDSs to produce the firehose) and the AppView (keeps a DB of all posts/likes/etc to serve users' requests). Expensive at scale anyway; if you want your own small network for hosting non-Bluesky posts (like WhiteWind's longer character limit), the event volume will be manageable.

For a lot of stuff though ATProto is built in a way that you shouldn't have to host your own; you can implement your own algorithmic feed that reads from the Bluesky Relay's firehose, or your own frontend that still gets data from the Bluesky AppView.

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#59

Post by oncallthrow »

msgilligan wrote: post #57
oncallthrow wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> The only way that makes any sense is if you subtract returns for sales made in a different period to the sales period you are considering Exactly. That's the way accounting works. They did not know in the previous quarter that the product would be returned in the following quarter, so they end up having negative sales in the current quarter. Yes it produces "garbage output", which I find amusing.

But that isn’t how you calculate market share, so what you’re saying is nonsense.

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#60

Post by sema4hacker »

oncallthrow wrote: post #45
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]

The story sounds fishy, but one way to have returns exceed sales is to ship 1,000 to stores on consignment, the store sells 500 of those for cash, the buyers return their 500 for refunds, and the store returns the remaining unsold 500. So 500 actual sales but 1,000 returns.
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