Comment by wmf

Actually, I would like you to genuinely reconsider this thought, we can definitely blame Bluesky, in fact, we can't really blame anyone else, certainly not users. The whole thing was their idea, after all, so if it doesn't work in practice, I mean, who else's fault is it? It's not that people are lazy or unwilling, after all, there are plenty of large Japanese Fediverse instances, they're some of the largest in the entire federation! Right now, as the service is exploding in popularity... you can't run a relay.

IMO, the point is, all of this architecture and the headache of decentralizing it is a waste of time if the most critical part for actually ensuring user sovereignty on a network winds up being centralized anyways. And based on the replies so far, what I'm getting is that nobody at Bluesky has a clear idea why anyone else would ever run a relay other than for the good of society. That's nice, but of the people running relays, none of the other entities that might run relays have the same level of stakes in it as they do. Bluesky is a company that presumably needs to eventually make money to stay afloat, but they basically built out the entire protocol, will run the app, and all of that jazz. They are the face of this. The users that are on Bluesky right now are by and large going through their infrastructure; presumably millions of users. Why in the world would someone else run a relay in this condition? You'd essentially be doing it to mostly support a network that is vastly controlled by one single entity, and there is no obvious reason why it will stop being vastly controlled by one single entity, too. It is a problem that the vast majority of users are on a small number of Mastodon servers, but with Bluesky there's little reason to believe right now that a vast majority of users ever won't be using Bluesky's infrastructure. If we're going to compare it to e-mail, then this is like if the only e-mail provider you could use for years was just GMail, and then slowly other providers were allowed to get whitelisted in. It is nice that the design of the network is so amenable to the potential of having it not be controlled by one entity, but there's the rub, I don't think they actually have any incentive to actually make serious efforts to fixing that problem. I don't know if they would even with substantial pressure from users to do so. Right now their messaging is basically "There might be a few entities that would run relays" suggesting that it is basically out of reach for people not at the scale of Google.

One could easily misread this thread to be about fringe content or more charitably, censorship, but I think the most accurate way to sum up my concerns is this: I don't think Bluesky's own incentives, nor the incentives that they are laying out with this design, are particularly fantastic for the health of the network they are building. It's not impossible that things could wind up working out anyways, but I worry that this is not actually going to be a sustainable system and that if there isn't substantially more thought put into this entire operation, it may basically wind up being just a very elaborate and overly complicated way to re-implement the exact same problems that centralization has.

That's not to say I believe they are working in bad faith or that they don't care or anything like that. Like I said, I assume they are actively trying to figure out how to make everything work without pissing everybody off. And I'd love to be highly optimistic and say that it will all work out, but I have my doubts. The silence is deafening.