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Apparently Bluesky has one centralized service, the "relay"

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Re: Apparently Bluesky has one centralized service, the "relay"

#31

The genie is already out of the bottle for thirty years, and it's called the open web. Luckily I don't need half the world's population to agree upon and use something that already exists out there. Keep posting on your website and keep linking. It's called the 'web' for a reason.

> It's called the 'web' for a reason. Yes, historic ones. It's not a prediction about the future shape of the internet.

You know why it's called the web? Because all the websites and webpages linking to each other form the shape of a web. I don't know what shape the internet is going to be, but the web is shaped like a web. Also tomorrow.

Re: Apparently Bluesky has one centralized service, the "relay"

#32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's called the 'web' for a reason. Yes, historic ones. It's not a prediction about the future shape of the internet.

You know why it's called the web? Because all the websites and webpages linking to each other form the shape of a web. I don't know what shape the internet is going to be, but the web is shaped like a web. Also tomorrow.

I love the web, but it is also clear that much of the internet is now a hub and spoke model. Client/server, in other words. The difficulty was always matching clients with different servers, and the centralised services never had to solve it.

Re: Apparently Bluesky has one centralized service, the "relay"

#33
post #9

Haven't we learned by now that approximately no one cares? Centralised services are vastly more popular than federated ones, the main reason being that they reduce the paradox / paralysis of choice when you're signing up for them. (Solve that problem properly and you may be on to something.)

I thought I had it (mostly) solved with fediverser: users would go to one place, sign up with OAuth to the service they wanted to leave (Reddit, Twitter...) and the system would behind the scenes create an account on any of the participating instances. In doing so, it could leverage the user existing information (subreddits subscribed, users followed on Twitter) and find the corresponding subreddits/users that are already registered.

Turns out the biggest challenge was not in getting users, but in convincing admins to join the network. Instances with open registrations are already dealing with spammer accounts, and none of them was excited about the idea of this extra vector for having unvetted users on their services.

This doesn't mean that centralized services are safe, though. I am reasonably convinced that we can have "social media" that is less focused on "platforms" and more like what we (used to) have with web: companies and institutions owning their presence by running ActivityPub "servers" on their own domain, and a hotch-potch of community/commercial servers to serve the users who want "basic access".

But to get there, we need to stop thinking that the way to get rid of Facebook/Twitter/Reddit/Instagram/YouTube is by taking their templates and tacking "but federated!", and we need to really come up with a killer app on ActivityPub (or Solid, or Linked Data, or ActivityPods) to disrupt the whole thing entirely.

Re: Apparently Bluesky has one centralized service, the "relay"

#34
post #19
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main reason is that they have marketing of a corporate entity behind them and someone to sign a contract with. I've seen many times - company switching from free, open-source, distributed solution to a worse, closed-source, coporate-backed solution just so they have someone to sign a contract with. First time it was moving from self-hosted Jabber to MSN Messanger (is sucked, worked less reliably than self-hosted…

The first startup I worked for had 1 IT guy among 12 people, and everything was in-house, including servers. The second grew to 50 people and did not ever employ an IT guy for internal work - most stuff was run on SaaS and the total cost was less than an IT guy salary. Any admin was done by taking engineering time, and no-one wanted to divert that away from product to do in-house stuff. Because when you're taking tim…

And you know what would be even cheaper (in the medium/long term) than the IT in-house or outsourcing to commercial SaaS? If the company took 10-20% of their budget to sponsor the development of FOSS alternatives.

Re: Apparently Bluesky has one centralized service, the "relay"

#35
post #9

Haven't we learned by now that approximately no one cares? Centralised services are vastly more popular than federated ones, the main reason being that they reduce the paradox / paralysis of choice when you're signing up for them. (Solve that problem properly and you may be on to something.)

Email has solved federation / decentralisation long before WWW.

Nobody is confused when you hand them a user@gmail.com, user@hotmail.com, etc; I use my own user@whatever.com and sometimes get a blank stare, until people realise you can go to www.gmail.com to check your own inbox, and you can totally just type www.whatever.com into your browser.

Links like reddit.com/u/user, youtube.com/@user, already exist and are de facto a standard of some kind. If we stop trying to make @user@whatever.com a thing, the only obstacle is in convincing people that whatever.com/user is just another link you can click, and this is totally how they can reach you - send you a message.

Federation between servers is an entirely different topic, but for the purpose of this discussion we can assume it's just an implementation detail - just like SMTP is for GMail users.

I'm probably making this sound more trivial than it actually is, but IMO all you have to do is build up on existing paradigms and collective understanding.

Re: Apparently Bluesky has one centralized service, the "relay"

#36
post #9

Haven't we learned by now that approximately no one cares? Centralised services are vastly more popular than federated ones, the main reason being that they reduce the paradox / paralysis of choice when you're signing up for them. (Solve that problem properly and you may be on to something.)

Maybe, but I think a lot of people are more acutely aware of the risks of centralized services lately, and I think BlueSky likely got a popularity boost by pretending to be decentralized.

Re: Apparently Bluesky has one centralized service, the "relay"

#37
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know why it's called the web? Because all the websites and webpages linking to each other form the shape of a web. I don't know what shape the internet is going to be, but the web is shaped like a web. Also tomorrow.

I love the web, but it is also clear that much of the internet is now a hub and spoke model. Client/server, in other words. The difficulty was always matching clients with different servers, and the centralised services never had to solve it.

I'm on HN for years now and what I slowly came to realize is that people here (maybe more than somewhere else, maybe not) like to spend time and energy explaining how stuff is, like it's still some sort of school test that gives one points for all the correct answers. Thereby easily forgetting what has been and still is, what works, what one can do about stuff in a positive way, what choices people have (instead of constantly pretending there is no choice, or someone else already chose for us), etc.

Even pointing out that people have a choice - with some work, yes, but only a little work - elicits some counter response that basically comes down to: no, you don't have a choice. I don't like that, and it also signals creative laziness.

P.S. Zoom out a little. The open web is also client/server (although peer-to-peer would be nice), that's not the point. We all need some infra, some trust, and a clear rule of law for the internet and the web to work. We just don't need big tech's view of 'social media' (there's nothing social about that) or platforms that present themselves as being an alternative as long as we have the perfect alternative - called the open web - being around for thirty years, battle tested and actively maintained by millions.

P.P.S. This is in reply to you, but read it as a general opinion, it's not a personal attack on anything you said.

Re: Apparently Bluesky has one centralized service, the "relay"

#38
post #35
post #9

Haven't we learned by now that approximately no one cares? Centralised services are vastly more popular than federated ones, the main reason being that they reduce the paradox / paralysis of choice when you're signing up for them. (Solve that problem properly and you may be on to something.)

Email has solved federation / decentralisation long before WWW. Nobody is confused when you hand them a user@gmail.com, user@hotmail.com, etc; I use my own user@whatever.com and sometimes get a blank stare, until people realise you can go to www.gmail.com to check your own inbox, and you can totally just type www.whatever.com into your browser. Links like reddit.com/u/user, youtube.com/@user, already exist and are de…

It's funny you mention gmail and hotmail. That's exactly my point. Who is setting up their own email server when they could instead sign up for one of those? Is it even 1 in 100,000 email users?

(I say this as someone running my own email server, who periodically has problems sending to gmail.)

Re: Apparently Bluesky has one centralized service, the "relay"

#39

Previously, related: Wait, how did a decentralized service like Bluesky go down? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43789178 - April 2025 (2 comments)

If you understand that Bluesky today is just Twitter for a different audience, then you realize nobody there cares about decentralization and all that mumbo jumbo.

Which is fine, I don’t care either, but this whole spiel that they are decentralized feels dishonest.

Re: Apparently Bluesky has one centralized service, the "relay"

#40
post #38
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email has solved federation / decentralisation long before WWW. Nobody is confused when you hand them a user@gmail.com, user@hotmail.com, etc; I use my own user@whatever.com and sometimes get a blank stare, until people realise you can go to www.gmail.com to check your own inbox, and you can totally just type www.whatever.com into your browser. Links like reddit.com/u/user, youtube.com/@user, already exist and are de…

It's funny you mention gmail and hotmail. That's exactly my point. Who is setting up their own email server when they could instead sign up for one of those? Is it even 1 in 100,000 email users? (I say this as someone running my own email server, who periodically has problems sending to gmail.)

I would count is as decentralized enough if there are a few major players, you have Google, Microsoft, I assume Proton Mail works fine though don’t know as I only use it for burner accounts, iCloud Mail including Apple’s cool private email relay thing. (Maybe other countries have big providers I dunno.) You can use your own domain and switch between providers if needed, and use custom email clients… it’s all the benefits of decentralization to the end user.
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