"How decentralized is Bluesky really?" by Christine Lemmer-Webber
"How decentralized is Bluesky really?" by Christine Lemmer-Webber
References
- "How decentralized is Bluesky really?". Christine Lemmer-Webber. DustyCloud.org. Published: 2024-11-22. Accessed: 2025-02-04T06:37Z. https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/.
Bears repeating: it's not.
🐻 "it's not. it's not. it's not. ..."
🐻 "it's not. it's not. it's not. ..."
🐻 "it's not. it's not. it's not. ..."
/j
Yes, and it's inherently designed not to be.
But it also bears repeating that decentralization by itself has no advantage, either.
But it also bears repeating that decentralization by itself has no advantage, either.
Could you expand on that?
Oh damn, that's a lot of cross-posts. I didn't know this had already been posted so many times before.
Yeah its a great read that people enjoyed a lot.
One of the best parts is where she explains that bluesky cant scale down. You can run an activitypub server on a literal potato by design, but bluesky can't ever be decoupled from it's "eye of god" central architecture. The best case scenario for atproto federation is wikipedia or the Internet archive hosting a competing federated instance, but neither have stepped into that "millions/month" role.
I think the head technical lead at bluesky responded in a very respectful and technical way and did cop to some limitatoons why highlighting blueskys strengths. That reply is here.
Thank you so much for the additional context!
I've never felt inclined to regard bluesky with hostility, but definitely wouldn't call myself a fan; honestly that was a really thoughtful reply and improved my impression of bluesky as a platform
I hope they can avoid the pitfalls of venture capital funding and build a platform that doesn't suck, even if mastodon will be my microblogging home on the internet :)
A second good read is her follow-up/response post: Re: Re: Bluesky and Decentralization
And Mastodon is decentralized in a way that makes it so people don't want to join the platform, so... To BlueSky we go!
If things were decentralized in similar way to crypto it would be way better for user adoption. The server side stuff is decentralized separately from the stuff users interacts with, so users can use a bunch of different websites to interact with the server side stuff, but they're always using the same credentials no matter the website they use and no matter the website they can interact with everything that ever happened on the servers, no one has the power to prevent users from seeing some of the transactions that happened (no admins) because the website they use are just a front used to simplify interaction with the servers.
[…] they’re always using the same credentials no matter the website they use and no matter the website they can interact with everything that ever happened on the servers, no one has the power to prevent users from seeing some of the transactions that happened (no admins) because the website they use are just a front used to simplify interaction with the servers. […]
Hm, IIUC, this is one of Bluesky's issues that the linked blog post was pointing out — if joining the network requires one to mirror all existing data, it makes it prohibitively expensive for anyone to spin up a server to join the network if the size of the network is enormous.
It could be done without having to clone all data though. Reddit is hosted by AWS and their data is distributed on multiple servers, so replace AWS by a bunch of people like you and me providing disk space for the data and tada, you can decentralized the database and just give people access to interacting with it directly (through code) or via various front-ends that people would create.
From a user perspective the front-end they use would be like Reddit before the API bullshit, it's just them using an app or a website to make things look good, but they have access to everything that's in the database and they're using the same credentials no matter which front-end they use.
The difference with Reddit is that since the hosts are just that, hosts to the data, they don't have admin power over users. They can filter the data that's hosted on their servers (like admins need to do now) but that content might be hosted by another server instead and they can't ban a user from the website itself since they don't control it (hence the crypto analogy, you can run a node, but it's just you adding one more server to the bunch, you don't have any real power over what's happening).
If things were decentralized in similar way to crypto it would be way better for user adoption.
IIUC, are you perhaps referring to something like Nostr?