Matrix needs to also be included in this. Matrix is fancier than mastodon, but more decentralized than AT Proto.
Yeah but it is NOT VC funded! So it doesn't get as much coverage.
Are we decentralized yet?
231–240 of 292 posts
Re: Are we decentralized yet?
#232Re: Are we decentralized yet?
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's ironic that national level politics mirrors the kind that the founding fathers did not ever want happening, while local politics has the kind of representation that they actually had in mind (in most places).
I'm not sure that is ironic.
No it's definitely ironic, in the rain on your wedding day kind of way.
Re: Are we decentralized yet?
#234Neat! 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.
They pivoted into that when Mastodon blew up in Japan, German authorities got involved, and its benevolent dictator Eugen Rochko felt need to distance himself from Japanese for his own safety. German police, especially parts of its federal counter-terrorism swat units(?) seem to have odd fixations with anime and take great offense with those contents for some reason.
They can roll that back, or push moderation angle more, but they won't be able to do so without also come forward with the fact that East Asia is producing substantially more amount overall and on average higher quality content incompatible with Western moderation. Those realities won't be popular anyway.
Re: Are we decentralized yet?
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
> [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 pul…
This only works for direct reply chains, right? It doesn’t provide a realtime view into all existing conversations that are happening on the post. Imagine if, when you refreshed this HN page, only comment chains you’re already in would refresh timely. Yes, this would “work” to some extent, but it would clearly be a regression. Additionally, going viral can overload your server due to this architecture. In ATProto thi…
Ah gotcha, yes, indirect replies would need to be forwarded or something.
(To be honest, I'm already surprised that Mastodon scaled as far as it did. I will say, if I had seen the state of the web's architecture 20 years ago today, I probably also would have claimed that it was inherently insecure and that there was no way to get it to be secure enough to scale to billions of users, so... I don't know, maybe people will keep finding duct tape solutions to make it work, worse-is-better-style.)
Re: Are we decentralized yet?
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can’t speak to how fast it grows and what it was, but I mean — if what you want is to keep the entire data of the network (similar to having all tweets on Twitter) ready to be queried then you have to store them. That’s just unavoidable in any technological solution. Alternatively you could hydrate and query posts on-demand from their sources (PDS), and people have done that as an experiment, but you need at least…
> if what you want is to keep the entire data of the network (similar to having all tweets on Twitter) ready to be queried then you have to store them. They need to be stored, but do they technically have to be stored by just one AppView? I get that it's a 100x easier to implement it like that, but I don't think a distributed search would've been technically impossible (although, granted, necessarily it would have ha…
I’m not sure what choice you’re referring to here. Yes, simply loading data from the database is the most straightforward solution, and that’s what Bluesky itself did for its AppView. That’s kind of the default model in general in web development — and has nothing to do with decentralization. If you were running a centralized Twitter, storing the amount that Twitter stores would cost you exactly the same.
On the contrary, ATProto adds flexibility here. There are community-run projects like https://constellation.microcosm.blue/ that let small application builders avoid that burden. Of course you don’t want to overwhelm those by building a massive app on top. But the point is that ATProto starts with equivalent baseline to what you’d pay running a centralized service, and then gives you room to play with distribution of costs, potentially going all the way down to directly querying PDS’s on-demand or something in between like community-maintained caches or even potential third-party app-agnostic aggregation services. Eg you could imagine AWS, Vercel or Cloudflare building “app platforms” in five years that let you cheaply query shared data.
As for creating “identical” nodes, I think you hit the nail on the head — that’s not what ATProto aims to do. The insight is that it’s not useful or feasible for everyone to run their own copy of Twitter. But that it’s possible for everyone with “proportional interest” to run a “proportionally complete” part, with some of the costs being amortizable and poolable across many users and apps (thanks to shared infrastructure) and always individually replaceable (to avoid lock-in). This is strictly better than centralized.
Re: Are we decentralized yet?
#237Earlier 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.
I thought only the way to avoiding the full firehose was connecting to Bluesky's centralized Jetstream instances, and that if anyone else wanted to host Jetstream without depending on Bluesky infra other than the PDS, they would still need to pay the full price for the firehose bandwidth and storage.
I'd be happy to be wrong here though.
Re: Are we decentralized yet?
#238HHI is a pretty interesting metric. It’s calculated by taking each firm’s market share, squaring it, and summing across all firms.
This gives the probability that two randomly chosen customers belong to the same firm.
In one micro models of oligopoly, Cournot competition, it lines up directly with the markup firms can sustain.
Outside of theory, it’s an intuitive way to average together the market power of all firms, with increases in market share for bigger players being weighted more heavily.
Re: Are we decentralized yet?
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
What? Most people are either incapable or unwilling to run their own mail servers. People could hack together their own social media or messaging sites in PHP, that doesn't mean Facebook and Twitter aren't centralized. That's what de facto means.
Re: Are we decentralized yet?
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ev…
So, you're making stuff up that obviously has no basis in reality here.
Migration would be impossible because the bsky.app PDS wouldn't allow anyone to access the data except for the bsky.app relay.
other appviews wouldn't display bsky.app data because both the PDS and relay would block them.