Comment by wmf
14 days ago
If Bluesky wants to be taken seriously they need to invest in decentralization themselves and not leave it as an exercise for the reader.
14 days ago
If Bluesky wants to be taken seriously they need to invest in decentralization themselves and not leave it as an exercise for the reader.
How many users actually care about decentralization?
None, and it's okay to make a centralised platform but I wish people wouldn't fall for the decentralised marketing hype.
Unfortunately most people couldn't care less. Bluesky has been lying about being decentralized since day 1, and yet they have millions of users.
Bluesky has been asymptotically approaching full decentralisation. A few years ago the gap was everything except a decentralised design, then it was AppViews, now it's "tooling and documentation" for the bit of the PKI that only 50 entities have done.
Meanwhile I lost my Mastodon account history because I moved once, couldn't interact with half the network or apps because I was on a non-Mastodon codebase instance, lost my account again because I stopped paying for access to the instance I was on, all classic signs of centralisation.
No, these are classic signs of decentralization.
Your posts still exist on every server that federated with you, there's just no central authority to coordinate reclaiming them.
Independent implementations having compatibility issues is what happens when there's no central authority enforcing conformance. Frustrating, yes, but it's a symptom of decentralization.
That's just how paying for services works. You could host your own instance, and nobody but yourself can revoke your access.
On Mastodon, if something goes wrong, nobody can cut you off the network entirely. On Bluesky, the author deleted an empty test account and is now blacklisted network-wide until Bluesky support decides to help. That is a classic sign of centralization.
2 replies →
They are at 0.1% decentralisation, how can you extrapolate asymptotic decentralisation from that?
I honestly can't tell if this comment is trolling.
5 replies →
I think most Bluesky users were happy with a centralized Twitter as long as the people running it were ideologically aligned.
I think a lot of those users do care but they don't know they've been lying.