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Are we decentralized yet?

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Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#101

Post by immibis »

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.

I made a Bluesky account. I posted some pretty boring replies to pretty boring posts, and still got banned. They didn't tell me why I was banned. I didn't bother trying to make my account immune from banning; I just quit since it was pretty boring there anyway. That's one data point against the migration hypothesis.

Bluesky isn't decentralized, anyway, because of the PLC directory.

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#103

Post by immibis »

fsflover wrote: post #63
colesantiago wrote: post #17

The honest truth is that: Nobody outside tech cares about decentralization or federation. At some point, everything converges to centralization. No amount of Mastodon servers or any fediverse self hosted instances spun up will change that. There is a reason that mastodon.social is the biggest instance and that they couldn't close registrations to promote decentralization. Hell, I would even say that threads is the bi…

> Nobody outside tech cares about decentralization or federation. Until the platform enshittifies like Reddit and Twitter did.

Still no one cares. They just hop to the next centralized platform that hasn't enshittified yet. As we are seeing now with Bluesky.

Perhaps the idea of decentralization was incorrect to begin with, an NI hallucination - perhaps it should be all about centralization-hopping instead. I believe this is what Nostr aims for, though I've never used it.

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#104

Post by bjourne »

So we are not decentralized. Git was a good attempt, but it kind of got centralized around GitHub, GitLab, and other variants. BitTorrent was decentralized, except tracker sites were the natural centralization points. Bitcoin was also decentralized, but still had Coinbase and other sites. Even SMTP is de facto centralized due to the spam problem.

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#105

Post by AgentME »

izacus wrote: post #76
danabramov wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I suspect that the cost of running AT proto servers/relays is prohibitive for smaller players compared to a Mastadon server selectively syndicating with a few peers, but I say this with only a vague understanding of the internals of both of these ecosystems. This isn't quite right. ATProto has a completely different "shape" so it's hard to make apples-to-apples comparison. Roughly speaking, you can think of Mastodon…

That's a big post that doesn't really explain in what way can smaller players federate with ATProto or how the structure allows federation. Reading through it, it just sounds like sharding/scaling for a centralized service that's meant to be owned and provided by a single entity.

Other people can run AppViews too (that operate over the same or different data). There are just less people doing that than hosting Mastodon instances partly because it's much more expensive to, because some of the benefits of hosting a Mastodon instance can be obtained much cheaper through running a PDS server, and because AppViews doesn't serve the same exact social role that Mastodon instances do. (Mastodon has every instance be a semi-isolated community, so Mastodon instances are often made for the social purpose of running a semi-isolated community. Bluesky users expect a global timeline that's not partitioned by server instances, so it doesn't get many people running AppViews specifically for fostering semi-isolated communities. People on Bluesky who want to foster semi-isolated communities tend to use features like custom timelines to do so instead.)

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#106

Post by danabramov »

mxuribe wrote: post #85
danabramov wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Running a relay is not expensive anymore (it used to be), with recent changes it's about $30/mo. Running an AppView that ingests all ongoing Bluesky traffic (and puts it into database) is more expensive ($300/mo currently) but if you were happy with a partial view of the network, you could get it down by a lot.

I'm admittedly not versed in the AT protocol, but $30/month is high for me. Something like $10/month is quite fair, and i would expect should be more than enough for a VPS to host my and 2 other members of my family for any social network service...This $10/month is overkill for other servers on the ActivityPub via say gotosocial, pleroma, etc. Not that ActivityPub is perfect or anything like that, i just mean that $…

Right, but a Relay is literally a network-wide optimization. That's why in my other comment I'm mentioning that it's hard to do apples-to-apples comparison. With Mastodon, you only have one possible role: "hosting an instance" (which is like hosting a mini-Twitter with almost no data). ATProto aims higher in terms of UX (shared world by default) so there are different distributable pieces with different incentives to run. Anyone can self-host a PDS for super cheap (which will store only your data). But running a Relay is useful as an optimization for whoever's running the actual backends. So if you're a company building on ATProto, maybe you run your own Relay just in case (or maybe you don't and reuse an existing one). Or if you're a collective of people, maybe you pool resources together to run your own independent Relay. It's not something you'd just run for yourself unless you're a huge enthusiast.

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#107

Post by danabramov »

qustrolabe wrote: post #80

Can someone explain how Fediverse instances or any decentralized platforms deals with most obvious issues of decentralization? Like if I join some node then one day it's offline and all my data lost. I mean surely instances usually don't disappear without notice but it still a totally possible thing. Or what about those times when entire instances get involved in dramas and end up defederating? I don't want to lose m…

In ATProto, this is solved by not having "instances". Your data is stored on a personal server (which can ofc go down). However, your identity isn't hard-tied to that server. If you have a backup (making those more easily available is being worked on by people in the ecosystem), you can restore it on another host and point your identity there instead. So there's one level of indirection which prevents the problem you're describing.

Additionally, since ATProto decouples hosting of data from hosting of applications, there is no such things as "instances" having beefs and defederating from each other. The data flows one way (from PDS to apps). Apps may choose to ban certain PDS's but generally PDS's themselves are treated as app-agnostic containers of data. So intra-network social beefs don't translate to technological cutoff or loss of mobility. Social groups and communities are decoupled from hosting.

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#108

Post by madeofpalk »

bjourne wrote: post #104

So we are not decentralized. Git was a good attempt, but it kind of got centralized around GitHub, GitLab, and other variants. BitTorrent was decentralized, except tracker sites were the natural centralization points. Bitcoin was also decentralized, but still had Coinbase and other sites. Even SMTP is de facto centralized due to the spam problem.

> except tracker sites

There are loads of different tracker sites. Many private. If one goes bad, others pop up to replace it. This is decentralised - there is not one player that strangles the ecosystem.

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