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Comment by yellowapple

2 days ago

> At every layer, the answer is "anyone can run their own." At every layer, almost nobody does.

And at every layer except for maybe the PLC directory, there's nothing stopping anyone from fixing that “almost nobody does” problem. The fact that such a thing is even possible, and that it's seamless to move from one to the other, gives ATproto a massive leg-up compared to even other federated systems, let alone its non-federated predecessors.

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yellowapple

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bccdee  2 days ago

Yeah they're describing a real problem, but the cause of that problem—a seamless centralized sign-up funded by VC money—is the reason bluesky took off to begin with.

Bsky offers an on-ramp to a more decentralized experience, but most people won't pay the money and experience the friction to move take that ramp. Platforms like Mastodon are entirely decentralized, but that means the friction of decentralizing happens immediately upon sign-up. The people who don't want to self-host PDSes never signed up for Mastodon to begin with.

I try to be skeptical, but I feel like bsky (or something like it) is the best way can do re: bringing decentralization to the masses.

  • user3939382  6 hours ago

    Or you get a Facebook XMPP situation where the federation is a cool feature few use until the platform’s mature enough to say actually no.

coldtea  2 days ago

>And at every layer except for maybe the PLC directory, there's nothing stopping anyone from fixing that “almost nobody does” problem.

If there's nothing stopping anyone from fixing a problem, and yet nobody fixes it, then there's something is stopping them.

Might not be a technical impossibility, or a gun in their head. Could be as simple as inertia or addiction.

But saying "the problem is totally solvable" just because there's a solution available, is pretty naive. Solutions have costs themselves, and not all are created equal or equally feasible.

  • tyre  1 day ago

    Or people don't think it's a problem!

    Maybe there are a ton of people who joined Bluesky because twitter devolved into a room-temperature-IQ right-wing hell hole, not because they cared about federation or whatever.

    Everything has trade-offs. Again and again people choose centralized services because they are a better product.

    • oskarw85  1 day ago

      It's exactly that. I have an account on Mastodon that I haven't opened in months. I use Bluesky a couple of times a day. On Mastodon I couldn't find interesting accounts to follow for weeks. On Bluesky I was up and running after an hour thanks to starter packs. Ease of use trumps (what a word!) philosophy for me. And probably most other people too.

      BTW I already lost 10 years of posting on Twitter. Did not care for a second. Do people REALLY care about their postings on micro blog sites? It's not like a box of photographs that I would pass to my children on my deathbed...

      2 replies →

    • neves  10 hours ago

      This was the reason I went to Bluesky. I understand the political advantages of decentralization, but centralized services work better.

      Remember that SMTP, the most decentralized platform that worked, now is centralized in a handful of companies.

    • coldtea  20 hours ago

      >Or people don't think it's a problem!

      Often that's a problem on its own (e.g. climate change)

  • davidgerard  1 day ago

    A relay or appview needs a ton of resources. Blacksky finally created the second ever real-world usable appview instance after 2.5 years.

    Also, the open source version of the appview doesn't work at Bluesky scale. You need a proprietary database for sufficient speed.

    AT Proto is completely decentralised, except for all the structural and financial points of absolute centralisation.

    • verdverm  1 day ago

      The relay is not that bad, the only really bad part is building an index, and most apps on the atmosphere have no need to index bluesky records, so the economics for them look very different.

      The work towards permissioned data and group-shared data will make it so apps can choose their own levels of "decentralization" of "federation" on atproto primitives. For example, two diametric options

      1. An app that is not open source code, but still does all the same atproto credible exit stuff. Naturally leans into winner-take-all

      2. An app that is tied to community, think something like Discord, where most servers don't care about what other servers are doing. Each community could run their own version and only care about their data. This is raspberry pi hostable.

phantomathkg  1 day ago

Fixing the problem requires 2 resources, the knowhow and the money. People need to know how to execute it safely, and people need to have the disposable income to run their PDS.

Even for tech people in HN, not everyone will have the disposable income to self-hosted every digital life lands on. Somehow, somewhere one may need to use free services paid by VC money.

kevinak  2 days ago

How would they fix it?

  • yellowapple  1 day ago

    I don't think “they” have a whole lot to fix. It's more a matter of people needing to fix their own laziness.

    I'll be the first to admit I'm guilty of this, too, and still haven't gotten around to moving my main account to a self-hosted PDS (though I've at least taken the steps to backup my CAR and set my own rotation keys, such that if my PDS goes offline or hostile I can still migrate away from it).