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Are we decentralized yet?

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Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#241

Post by immibis »

fsflover wrote: post #201
immibis wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's a common mistake of programmers to treat business as something long-term. Saying "don't do XYZ because it'll stop working in a year once they catch on and block you. Business leaders are stupid for doing XYZ." Yeah, so that means you still made a profit for a year, and business leaders are not stupid for doing it. A year later, there could be a different thing that will work for another year. Changing what you do every year or even more often is just normal business. You don't have to find one thing that works indefinitely.

Maybe social media is like business.

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#242

Post by shadowgovt »

danabramov wrote: post #172
shadowgovt wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure where you reached the conclusion that you can't have a realtime public threaded conversation on Mastodon; I do it frequently. The way it generally works is that clients will auto-at-tag people in the conversation, which makes sure the message is routed to all in the conversation within more-or-less milliseconds. Auto-at-tagging doesn't scale to dozens and dozens of actively-engaged speakers, but neither…

I realize that we might be arguing over definitions here, but to me part of the experience of Twitter-like conversation is seeing other replies appear in real time even when they’re not directed at me — same as how you’ve noticed this thread on HN. Seeing the existing convo in real time lets me decide which points to engage with and which have been explored, and to navigate between branches as they evolve in real tim…

Oh, that's supported (though the UX is not really ideal): if they're not on the same server as you, you can navigate to the post on its host server and you'll see all replies there. To join the conversation, you can hit reply on one of the posts and you'll get a UI popup to route you back to your own server to respond from there.

It's definitely not as clean as a centralized solution though.

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#243

Post by shadowgovt »

neltnerb wrote: post #160
shadowgovt wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious if you could expand on this observation? I've heard this from other Mastodon users but I haven't seen it myself; I wonder if it varies heavily from server to server or if I've just gotten lucky.

Moderation (the intent and success) varies to such a huge extent that it's practically silly to talk about moderation on Mastodon unless you mean moderation on a specific mastodon server (like mastodon.social). But moderation (the process) is intense and servers are usually community run on the change found in a spare couch (i.e. they're volunteers). I think they do quite well considering the disparate resource level…

Thank you for the clarification; that makes sense.

It is perhaps also worth noting that the Fediverse architecture does nothing to remove racists or bigots from the possibility of being found in the "fediverse" (here referring to the collection of all servers using the protocol and not the protocol itself), and... That's pretty much as-intended. Truth Social uses Mastodon as its backend; there is nothing the creators / maintainers of Mastodon could, or by design would, do to shut it off. The same architecture that makes it fundamentally impossible for Nazis to shut down a gay-friendly node makes it impossible for other people to shut down a Nazi node; there is merely the ability of each node to shield its users from the other.

That's a feature of the experiment, not a bug, and reasonable people have various opinions on that aspect of it.

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#244

Post by OneDeuxTriSeiGo »

immibis wrote: post #240
OneDeuxTriSeiGo wrote: post #205

Earlier 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? 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.

No. That's just not remotely close to true or feasible.

> So, you're making stuff up that obviously has no basis in reality here.

I cannot understand why you are claiming this. I'm basing off the actual architecture and the way the parts interact. The design is just not feasible for locking down. Doing so completely breaks the model and it still leaks like a sieve if you try to.

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> Migration would be impossible because the bsky.app PDS wouldn't allow anyone to access the data except for the bsky.app relay.

Nope. Migration is still fully possible. Migration doesn't happen via the relay or any PDS->PDS mechanism. Migration is done via the client. The client/user runs operations on the source PDS, the destination PDS, and the DID registry. All the data is transported between by the client.

Specifically the way it works is you export/backup your information from your current PDS (in the form of a CAR file + blobs). Technically this step is optional. Even if the PDS goes offline or becomes hostile you can actually largely reconstruct this data from the network. Then you "create a new account" on the new PDS and upload your data that you backup up/recovered onto the new PDS. Then you update your DID to point to the new PDS. And finally you deactivate the account on the original PDS (basically saying I no longer store stuff here anymore).

This is part of the reason why migration tooling is a bit bumpy. Your JS script or app has to do the entire process by itself rather than letting the backends handle it. However it does make them extraordinarily resistant to data loss and/or takeover.

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> other appviews wouldn't display bsky.app data because both the PDS and relay would block them.

Relays work via gossip. If you can see the relay at any point, you can gossip 100% of their contents to another relay.

In the event bluesky PBLLC locked down their appview and PDS, they'd still have to make the relay open or everything breaks. Feed providers need access to the firehose. Labelers/Moderation Services need access to the firehose. And so on.

Everything is built with an assumption of a public firehose and if you lock down the firehose, all you need is one person to listen to the locked down firehose to 100% replicate it and gossip onto any other relay.

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#245

Post by msgilligan »

kelnos wrote: post #221
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…

> Market share (for a given period) That's not a thing. Market share has no time period. It's an instantaneous measure of the state of things right now. How many of your company's units are out in the wild right now being used, vs. how many total units (sold by any company) are out there in the wild right now being used. That number can and will be different at different points of time, as people buy and return your…

The wikipedia definition is here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_share

There are multiple methods of measuring multiple (related) things. What you are describing sounds more like the share of the installed base, which only works for certain types of products. (i.e. it doesn't work for consumables like apples or electricity)

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#246

Post by hoidofyolen »

immibis wrote: post #240
OneDeuxTriSeiGo wrote: post #205

Earlier 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? 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.

First of all, Bluesky the company would have to implement auth on the communication between relay and AppView, cut off everyone from using their relay, and specifically stop ingesting content from non-Bluesky PDSs. There would be time when we realize that's happening to get another AppView up and running. There are arguably enough resources in either the ATproto dev community or other funding sources that another AppView could pop up within a week or two, and be maintained by the community for months without issue. And Bluesky wouldn't likely stop existing altogether, so people would log into Bluesky, see the news (or hear it elsewhere), and see people talking about how to get access to your account.

Secondly, while you're right that most people don't have copies of their repos, some copies of the entire network exist in the community, as well as copies of the PLC Directory. Within a couple weeks we would have community run versions of the AppView, PDSs, Relays, and PLC, and some seriously pissed off community members who would now want to do everything they can to take up the mantle temporarily. Soon Bluesky the app, as well as Instagram and Twitter, would be flooded with tutorials of how to recover your accounts and migrate to another PDS.

If your point is that we'd lose at least half of the users of Bluesky, then yea probably. But ATproto would be just fine, and if people want to get their data back they likely can, as long as they can stomach a little work. And that process is getting easier all the time.

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#247

Post by OneDeuxTriSeiGo »

quectophoton wrote: post #237
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 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.

Yes and no.

If you want to avoid the entire bandwidth of the firehose, you need something like jetstream (at least until something like sharded relays come around).

However the relay gossip protocol is not as taxing as it used to be. Relay Sync 1.1 massively decreased overhead and it allows relays to run "thin", i.e. running with only a certain backlog of history and not carrying the full history of the network. So you can make a relay that only keeps 24 hours of history and it'll perpetually stay under like 100gb of storage (I don't remember the exact storage amount but storage size is pretty linear with backlog history).

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#248

Post by hoidofyolen »

shadowgovt wrote: post #242
danabramov wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I realize that we might be arguing over definitions here, but to me part of the experience of Twitter-like conversation is seeing other replies appear in real time even when they’re not directed at me — same as how you’ve noticed this thread on HN. Seeing the existing convo in real time lets me decide which points to engage with and which have been explored, and to navigate between branches as they evolve in real tim…

Oh, that's supported (though the UX is not really ideal): if they're not on the same server as you, you can navigate to the post on its host server and you'll see all replies there. To join the conversation, you can hit reply on one of the posts and you'll get a UI popup to route you back to your own server to respond from there. It's definitely not as clean as a centralized solution though.

This kind of UX is the main reason I personally dont use Mastodon. It's just not intuitive

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#249

Post by jchw »

neko-moe wrote: post #226
jchw wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, to be honest, I'm surprised anyone runs a third-party Bluesky AppView even just as a curiosity. I genuinely can't understand why anyone would run one of these except as a raw curiosity. If 99% of the people are using the default AppView, the default relay, the default indexers, the default PDSes, etc, etc... that just means that everything that almost the entire userbase sees is completely controlled by one entit…

> [...] It's technically possible for people to use alternative services, but the community would have to wrestle the majority control of the network away from Bluesky Social PBC for it to really matter. [...] > [...] now you just have the same split world that exists in the Fediverse, but with AppViews/moderation services. It kinda seems like the "shared picture of the world" concept is actually somewhat incompatibl…

> I'm personally one of the largest critics of how Bluesky Social PBC treat Japanese anime-style illustrators, so I share your frustration here. Though it's worth noting that large Mastodon instances do the same kind of moderation. Trying to follow illustrators on misskey.io from mastodon.social is very much a toin coss if they're censored or not.

I can't stress this enough: I don't find it acceptable to ban people if they like posts or follow someone who gets banned. That sort of guilt-by-association is insane. It's one thing to be more censorial than Twitter, which is a choice you can make if you want to, but Bluesky went many steps way too far in how they enforce the rules. I still can't even fathom what actually got me banned, and the cowards there would never admit it (because they know it was wrong.) The only way I'd ever consider going back is if they announced that they fired everyone who thought that was a good idea.

If they're willing to do insane shit like that, I would absolutely not trust any of the other aspects of the components ran by Bluesky Social PBC, so it's far more than an AppView that is needed for sure.

Then there's the fact that Bluesky Social PBC constantly advertised itself as a decentralized alternative to Twitter back before it had launched, well, any decentralized components. Before you could run your own PDS, and certainly before they stopped requiring whitelisting. People make a lot of hooplah about how users shouldn't care about decentralization. Well, a lot of people leaving Twitter at the time did care about decentralization, because they were tired of what was happening to their Internet and wanted a durable alternative. To this day, Bluesky doesn't really actually practically have any of the properties of decentralization that anyone would care about. They know it damn well.

I hate that everybody is just going to let this happen, and I hate that Bluesky proponents jump in and try their hardest to make it seem like there's hope for things to not be controlled by one entity. There isn't. It's a complete load of shit.

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#250

Post by jonahx »

saurik wrote: post #187
jonahx wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The link back to the real world is money in your bank account. While Coinbase is not the only market player who can provide that (put money in your bank in exchange for bitcoin), it's the biggest, and so there is (to a degree) de facto centralization. More so given that if Coinbase fell (due to government seizure or similar), it's likely sibling services would fall as well. Ofc, your bitcoin would still be "safe" and…

But, Coinbase is not, actually, the biggest... not by far? Binance is like, 20x larger. And it isn't even as if you need to get dollars for your Bitcoin, in case the United States government decides to go aggro, so you can find someone in another country to convert you out through another currency. If this is our definition of centralized, then it is difficult to believe that anything is decentralized. There are enou…

I was using Coinbase as a placeholder -- I am not up on current market share status but most people I know in the US use Coinbase. The point stands.

> so you can find someone in another country to convert you out through another currency

This is not so easy for large amounts -- the whole reason to use a Coinbase is institutional trust -- and is certainly inconvenient. In practical terms, across the ecosystem of users, it would not be some small roadbump but a massive problem.

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