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Are we decentralized yet?

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Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#201

Post by fsflover »

immibis wrote: post #103
fsflover wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Still no one cares. They just hop to the next centralized platform

It's a wrong interpretation. Since they leave, they obviously care. They just don't know that decentralized platforms offer long-term solution.

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#202

Post by topranks »

bjourne wrote: post #186
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even SMTP is de facto centralized due to the spam problem. It's important to note that this isn't "you have to be big in order to be able to filter spam". That's not true at all; decentralized anti-spam lists have been a thing for decades and the big sites don't have any significant advantage in filtering spam. It's allegedly that big sites will mark small sites as spam even when they're not, which makes it hard to…

Sure, but how many email users have a reverse DNS entry or even know what that is? DKIM? It is, de facto, beyond the reach of 99.9 % of all email users.

Right but if you are going to run and operate server infrastructure for yourself you need to know about that stuff.

You saying the average admin is gonna have no issue setting up their MX records but “won’t even know” what a reverse DNS entry is?

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#203

Post by oncallthrow »

matt_kantor wrote: post #166
oncallthrow wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

With this formula market share for past periods can keep changing arbitrarily far into the future (depending on the companies' return policies).

Yes.

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#204

Post by Merovius »

grishka wrote: post #189
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…

This is due to different design goals. Bluesky's architecture was pretty much dictated by the premise that anyone needs to be able to see any post on the entire system, regardless of whether they have any connections with the author. That algorithmic entertainment-style feeds need to exist. You do need that firehose and other expensive infrastructure for that, there's no going around it. The fediverse, on the other h…

> Bluesky's architecture was pretty much dictated by the premise that anyone needs to be able to see any post on the entire system, regardless of whether they have any connections with the author. That algorithmic entertainment-style feeds need to exist. You do need that firehose and other expensive infrastructure for that, there's no going around it.

Exactly this (that people want it at least - I don't think that means it needs to exist). And I think there would be a lot less frustration in the discourse of ActivityPub vs. ATproto, if we could collectively agree that you can't get this in a decentralized system. In a dense network, the number of edges scales with the square of the number of nodes. It's just not feasible to have a network that is both dense and has a large number of nodes.

I think "I prioritize virality, recommendation engines and network density, thus accept giving control over the network to a centralized and profit-oriented entity" is an entirely reasonable tradeoff to make. I just don't understand why BlueSky users don't seem to accept that it's the tradeoff they are making.

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#205

Post by OneDeuxTriSeiGo »

immibis wrote: post #174
kyle-rb wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No I think ATProto is "built this way". The firehose is just the output of the Relay. If Bluesky wanted to shut off the firehose, they would have to make changes to ATProto or stop conforming to ATProto. I understand that Bluesky's conformance to ATProto is just a promise, but it's a better promise than you get from most websites. Also in the meantime, if you migrate to a self-hosted PDS, you can ensure that even if…

What do you think would happen if the Bluesky company suddenly blocked everyone but https://bsky.app/ servers from using their relays? And what if, before they did that, they updated the PDS code so it blocked all relays except for their one? I'm not asking what you would do. I'm asking what would happen because of what everyone does. I think the name "Bluesky" would refer to the fully centralized bsky.app, and 99.9%…

> What do you think would happen if the Bluesky company suddenly blocked everyone but https://bsky.app/ servers from using their relays?

That's not how it works. Appviews pick the relay they use, not the client/user. The relay is used for gossip into the appview (and other things).

More importantly, appviews never see the client/user directly. Appviews only talk to the PDS. Really most things other than the client ever only talk to the PDS or listen to the relay. The only thing that ever directly talks to the client is the PDS.

The way atproto services generally work is the client configures a series of XRPC requests with HTTP headers to determine what appview, labelers, etc to use and it issues that request to the PDS. The PDS then proxies that request to the appview or wherever and they respond back to the PDS which routes the response back to you.

So in a real sense your PDS is not just a data host, but also operates akin to an IRC bouncer.

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> And what if, before they did that, they updated the PDS code so it blocked all relays except for their one?

PDS relay routing, etc is mostly all handled manually via config files,etc so this isn't really a concern. And PDS code is probably the "easiest" part of the ecosystem to hack on which is why there are like 6 different implementations with the majority (like 4) that maintain near feature parity with the "bluesky PDS" software.

And importantly, the bluesky PDS is literally a sqlite DB, an OAUTH implementation, some go IPLD data structure manipulation code, and a go XRPC router. It's fairly trivial to hack on as needed.

------

> I'm not asking what you would do. I'm asking what would happen because of what everyone does. I think the name "Bluesky" would refer to the fully centralized bsky.app [...]

Migration currently isn't perfect but within ~6 months it should be ironed out by the community at which point migrating off a PDS to another is just a matter of:

1. click button on new PDS to transfer/"create new account".

2. set your new email, password, and list your old/current handle.

3. get auth code via email (one from the new PDS and one from your DID provider)

4. input codes into migrator interface (for whichever migrator you are using)

5. log into your apps again.

There are multiple large PDS operators working really really hard to spin up operations (proper backups, failover, HA, etc) so they can run reliably and avoid the "my mastodon instance imploded guess everything is gone" issue. Open federation is only about ~ a year old (plus change) so the community is only just now really reaching the "mature third parties" stage.

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#206

Post by Vinnl »

danabramov wrote: post #38
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…

>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…

> [1] Mastodon is adding a workaround for this with on-demand fetching, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45078133 for my questions about that; in any case, this is limited by what you can do on-demand in a pull-based decentralized system.

I'm not super up-to-date on Mastodon's/ActivityPub's workings, but aren't replies to a post pushed to the original poster's server? So wouldn't followers then be able to pull from that server at any time to get an always-up-to-date view of replies, at least theoretically? (With maybe posts from the last few seconds missing if the network's slow.)

(Asking because I've seen you claim that the architecture is inherently limited to never be able to achieve the "cohesive" experience.)

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#207

Post by OneDeuxTriSeiGo »

mdasen wrote: post #91
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…

> 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. ATProto isn't "built this way". Twitter was also built in a way where you could implement your own stuff - and then Twitter took that away. With Mastodon, there is on…

> ATProto isn't "built this way".

ATProto is built this way. "Closing off bluesky" would be an extraordinarily non-trivial process and would break basically everything. This is in large part why private data isn't a thing yet. The architecture is diametrically opposed to it.

> Bluesky could decide to stop publishing the firehose or restrict its APIs - just as Twitter did.

They could "technically" completely rearchitect their application frontend and backend to do this but any effort to do so would be visible from miles away given the architecture and warning claxons would start ringing immediately.

> And Bluesky is a for-profit company that has raised around $30M in VC.

Bluesky PBLLC is a for-profit "public benefit corporation" for what it's worth and the way they are structured would open them up to legal consequences if they were to move diametrically opposed to the mission they were founded on. Not just because they are a PBLLC but because their initial investment funding was drawn up under an explicit contract that views moves against "the development of decentralised social media" as a violation of the terms of that contract.

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#208

Post by OneDeuxTriSeiGo »

HexDecOctBin wrote: post #125
danabramov wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>in what way can smaller players federate with ATProto or how the structure allows federation. Each of the pieces I've described (PDS, Relay, AppView) implement the protocol specified at https://atproto.com/ . Anything that acts as an ATProto PDS can be used as an ATProto PDS, anything that acts as an ATProto Relay can be used as an ATProto Relay, and so on. I'm not sure I understand the question so pardon the tautol…

I think what they are asking is: if I run a my own BlueSky AppView, how do I integrate with the bluesky.app so that users signed in on my AppView can interact with users on the the main AppView and vice versa? This is how most of us think about federalisation.

An appview is really just a service for hydrating content in the skeleton of posts that feeds return back to give to the user.

The only things they do other than feed hydration are track notifications, (optionally) provide a search engine, (optionally) provide a CDN, and (temporarily until E2EE rolls out) handle DMs.

So you can actually do things like the Red Dwarf [1] project which is a bluesky client without an appview. It's slower, you visibly notice request loading/pop-in, there's no notifications, and no search but it works with any other bluesky appview (since appviews are basically a lens into atproto rather than an independent service).

--------

If you wanted to run your own infrastructure, instead you'd probably want to run your own PDS. Running an appview has its benefits of course but the main way you "self host" is to run a PDS. That's fairly trivial and people have run them on all kinds of constrained hardware (including a literal jailbroken microwave if I remember correctly).

1. https://tangled.sh/@whey.party/red-dwarf

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#209

Post by danabramov »

skybrian wrote: post #194
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…

What is zeppelin.social? Who runs it? They don’t seem to have an about page.

https://whtwnd.com/futur.blue/3ls7sbvpsqc2w

Edit: I think the author’s server may be busted or something. The link should be correct though. I’ll ping them. The announcement is at https://bsky.app/profile/futur.blue/post/3lsc2tzfsys2f

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#210

Post by ttiurani »

danabramov wrote: post #38
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…

>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…

> You can run one (and it costs about $300/mo to run a Bluesky AppView ingesting all data currently on the network in real time if you want to do that).

A clarifying question: the blog post [0] I found about zeppelin.social which I think is a full AppView, the author said this:

"The cost to run this is about US $200/mo, primarily due to the 16 terabytes of storage it currrently uses"

Last I heard the amount of storage was just a couple of terabytes so the growth seems to be very fast.

If and when the primary cost is the storage, IMO the crucial question is: what's the expected future cost of running community AppViews?

Because unless storage cost drops as fast as the BlueSky data grows (unlikely?), to me this architecture looks like it will very soon kick out smaller players and leave only BlueSky with enough money to keep the AppView running.

[0] https://whtwnd.com/futur.blue/3ls7sbvpsqc2w

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