Comment by jacoblambda
2 years ago
It's actually pretty substantially different in that mastodon's instances/servers are everything whereas here each part is separate and you can generally use multiple of each.
Bluesky has:
Identity via DIDs. With web DIDs this identity is tied to your domain name and there is no bluesky infrastructure associated with it. It's 100% in your hands (but you can't change names or domains easily). But alternatively you can use a plc DID which does use their centralised infrastructure (currently) while allowing you to easily change your name or domain. With these you get one DID per account.
PDS (personal data servers) or "data repositories" that hold your post content. You can self host this or use Bsky's central PDS. You can only use one of these per account.
Indexers that aggregate posts from all the PDS/data repos. These create what bluesky calls "the firehose".
Relays that route and cache traffic.
App views which give you your actual application like bluesky.
Feed services that give you your "algorithm" for what your page looks like. You can subscribe to as many of these as you like or host your own.
Then you finally get labellers like what is discussed here. Compared to with mastodon you can follow multiple labellers at the same time. Those labellers can provide automated content warnings, etc or manual moderation. But importantly at the end of the day no matter what the labellers do, you control how they act and whether they are just a warning/blur or if they actually hide the content.
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That all compares to mastodon where everything is tied up under one server/instance and your control over moderation boils down to "run your own instance and do all the mod work yourself" or "rely on some other instance with no oversight whatsoever".
This isn't to say that mastodon's approach didn't make sense at the time but like you said the bluesky approach makes quite a bit more sense and makes it way easier for the user to move around between their options.
The advantage of Mastodon is that you can actually run the whole thing on your own to not be forced under anyones moderation whereas with bluesky there are still central parts run by a US corporation that will censor you.
Not saying that the fediverse is a great design - tying identities to instances is inexcusable. But Bluesky's central corporate backing makes it a nonstarter.
With bluesky there are actually fairly few parts that are central.
Now that PDS are available for federation, you can host all your own data. Apparently relays are now also federated as part of the PDS as well but I haven't gotten a chance to look into that aspect yet.
You can choose your own custom feed services and labellers.
The app itself (web and mobile) is open source so you can build it yourself without the default bluesky labeller or feed if you wanted to.
Even identities can be done without using any central servers by using web DIDs instead of plc DIDs.
The only thing that you have to go through a centralised system for are the indexers which to my knowledge are part of BGS. BGS is open source, it's just still in the process of being federated.
So you can use bluesky with 90% of it not under any US authority and if you give it a year that should be 100%.
> So you can use bluesky with 90% of it not under any US authority and if you give it a year that should be 100%.
Yes, it is theoretically decentralized but that isn't all that useful. If you still need to go through Bluesky-the-company to interact with 99.9% of the users then you really haven't gained that much from running your own server and building your own app. This isn't very far from claiming that everything is decentralized because you can always build your own network.