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Are we decentralized yet?

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Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#131

Post by danabramov »

indexxing wrote: post #116
danabramov wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:pl…

one important correction is that blacksky is not hosting their own appview, they host their own PDS for users to join and a soft-fork of the official client

Ah, apologies, thanks! Lemme edit.

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#132

Post by alethic »

danabramov wrote: post #122
alethic wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect them to be unimportant. This has been merged upstream and running on the flagship Mastodon instance for a little while now. There is also a section related to performance available at the link I posted. Third header, "Likely Concerns", second subheader, "DoS/Amplification".

What do you mean by unimportant? I mean from the user's perspective: when I open a thread, I expect to instantly see the entire discussion happening across the entire network, with the paginated data coming back in a single roundtrip. Moreover, I expect every actor participating in the said discussion (wherever their data is stored) to see the same discussion as I do, with the same level of being "filled in", and in…

I'm not very interested in arguing over the ins and outs of "user expectations" and Mastodon vs. Bluesky, sorry. I would suggest you try it yourself and come to your own conclusion about whether this is a usable system :^)

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#133

Post by danabramov »

danabramov wrote: post #131
indexxing wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

one important correction is that blacksky is not hosting their own appview, they host their own PDS for users to join and a soft-fork of the official client

Ah, apologies, thanks! Lemme edit.

Actually it doesn't look like I'm able to edit anymore, so I'll upvote your comment.

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#134

Post by N_Lens »

dom96 wrote: post #114
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…

> BlueSky (for the average user) is pretty much a drop in replacement for Twitter. One reason Bluesky is so successful is because it doesn't shove decentralisation into the user's face like Mastodon does. The vast majority of people don't know what decentralisation is and don't care to. I think that far too much effort is put into decentralisation and not enough into good moderation on these platforms.

Moderation is definitely Fediverse’s weakness.

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#135

Post by forrestthewoods »

not_kurt_godel wrote: post #127
hoppp wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well git was not really an attempt at decentralization so there is that.

And in many ways it actually is remarkably meaningfully decentralized - or perhaps "effectively" decentralized - in terms of every node having a full working copy of entire repositories that can be trivially cloned to another provider or stood up on a self-hosted server.

I’d say the opposite. Git is defacto centralized. And I’d go further and say that attempting decentralization is the biggest problem with Git. It maybe makes sense for Linux. But for 99.999% of projects it makes everything so much worse.

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#136

Post by diggan »

madeofpalk wrote: post #108
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.

> There are loads of different tracker sites

Not to mention the mainline DHT. Not impossible or even very resource hungry to run a scraper/crawler/listener and be able to search via it, like bitmagnet (https://bitmagnet.io/) that has some fun pipe-dreams like federation of indexers and something like an decentralized private tracker.

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#137

Post by danabramov »

alethic wrote: post #132
danabramov wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by unimportant? I mean from the user's perspective: when I open a thread, I expect to instantly see the entire discussion happening across the entire network, with the paginated data coming back in a single roundtrip. Moreover, I expect every actor participating in the said discussion (wherever their data is stored) to see the same discussion as I do, with the same level of being "filled in", and in…

I'm not very interested in arguing over the ins and outs of "user expectations" and Mastodon vs. Bluesky, sorry. I would suggest you try it yourself and come to your own conclusion about whether this is a usable system :^)

I'm arguing that "not really consistent" from the grandparent post still applies, and therefore your "this isn't correct" isn't correct.

For realtime discussions (like this one), I don't think we can call it consistent if it takes multiple minutes for each back-and-forth reply to propagate across instances in the best case (and potentially longer through multiple hops?) because you'll see different things depending on where you're looking and at which point in time.

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#138

Post by [deleted] »

estimator7292 wrote: post #111
oncallthrow wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably by a journalist who doesn’t understand what market share is

Everybody else is telling you you're wrong and you're doubling down and insisting that respectable journals are morons who don't understand anything. You should stop, reflect on this fact for a moment, then go pick up a goddamn book

[deleted]

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#139

Post by oncallthrow »

msgilligan wrote: post #71
oncallthrow wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There are multiple ways of calculating market share (e.g. units vs dollars or for different time periods) but assuming it is measured in dollars for a quarterly time period, how would you calculate the market share based upon my sample data above?

(company sales in period - company returns for sales made in said period) / (industry sales in period)

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#140

Post by yoshuaw »

danabramov wrote: post #66
kyle-rb wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

> Running a relay is not expensive anymore [...]

$30/mo is $360/yr, which for most people is a prohibitively large sum of money. That would make Bluesky access more expensive than even the most expensive Netflix subscription; closer to the cost of a cellular plan.

For comparison: for my Mastodon account I pay $5/mo or $60/yr to a dedicated hosting provider. This puts it in the same ballpark as paying for a private email host or a VPN subscription.

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