4w ago

How decentralized is Bluesky/ATProto?

(I rewrote the title seven times, I'm just going with this)

I tried Bluesky because of its growing popularity, and I'm confused about its supposedly decentralized nature. Yes, you can "own" your account with a custom domain, but everything else is centralized onto the one instance which is Bluesky - there's no federation or anything like that (?) so I don't see why people promote it as being anti-big corporation even though it may become that at this rate.

With Mastodon/ActivityPub, federated instances connect through the underlying software that they all share. Heck, you can even communicate with other software like Lemmy through the ActivityPub protocol. Sure, I guess you don't "own" your account/likes/etc, but I think it's way better than being locked in to solely one instance and not having the ability to switch if the one your using doesn't appeal to you in some way.

I'm sure I'm missing and/or an incorrect on some information about all this, so I'm really just hoping someone can explain it in a way that I understand.

9 comments

they're using decentralized like it's a marketing term hoping to draw in people who are sick of the enshitification we get from the likes of reddit and facebook.
bluesky has already enshitified imo ever since they started censoring gazan users for reporting on the genocide by pretending it's all spam.
- bluesky has already enshitified imo ever since they started censoring gazan users for reporting on the genocide by pretending it's all spam.
  Do you have more info on that?
  
  Bluesky is apparently deleting the accounts of Palestinians in Gaza under the guise of “spam.” Requests to correct this have so far gone unanswered. https://t.co/vbBfz8TFL2 pic.twitter.com/X4o7OifWlh
  — Writers Against the War on Gaza (@wawog_now) November 14, 2024

People talked about this yesterday. It is not decentralized, and based on who is in control of Bluesky, in my opinion it won’t be: https://lemmy.ml/post/22830283/15144160
- That's my view on it as well. The service isn't set up to where people could operate a Bluesky like service without Bluesky right now. If that is the case, then Bluesky can easily close off interoperable parts one by one, just like Twitter did. Remember when Twitter allowed third party apps to access the service?
- Man I was really hoping this wouldn't be the answer I get - thanks for the link

Personal data storage can be decentralized, although that's missing the social part of the social network.
Identities are set up through a centralized system that in theory they could change, but I wouldn't bet on it.
Relays supposedly can be decentralized, but need to handle all data on the network. So they require massive hosting costs that keep going up as more people use bluesky. Only large corporations can likely afford to run them, and that hasn't happened yet.

If I understand it correctly, it's "federated" in the sense that you can create similar infrastructure to Bluesky's using ATProto and have your posts show up there, but that reality seems pretty academic because not many people are doing that compared to Mastodon.
- i mean, mastodon has also been around for a while… i think there are other things that people have raised - relays being expensive etc - that make it less practically decentralised, however even if you have a single mastodon instance that doesn’t make mastodon not federated
  the potential is there for less centralisation than currently exists, because they’ve been quickly growing and want to control the roll-out (which is why they had closed sign ups for ages)… i don’t think that necessarily makes it bad - we will have to see how things progress
  worth noting too that there’s bridgy fed, so in the future if bsky becomes trash, it should be far easier for people to move to AP
  it’s at least a step up, with enough open that it’ll be easier to convince people to make good (ActivityPub) choices in the future - probably when we stop complaining about why everyone is rushing to bsky and start fixing the UX issues with the fediverse that led to them not using mastodon etc instead

9 comments