There’s been some debate over the last year or so regarding Bluesky and how decentralized it really is. There has also been a growing fear that “enshittification is inevitable.” Or, worse, that an “evil billionaire” might take it over and ruin it the way other platforms have been ruined.
But I think it’s important to understand that Bluesky has, effectively, created a technological poison pill: by building on an open protocol, ATprotocol, the system itself can be rebuilt outside of Bluesky, but in a way where everyone can continue to communicate, and that creates incredible incentives that undermine any evil billionaires, and would actually punish Bluesky (or anyone else!) should they try to enshittify.
It’s entirely possible to produce a centrally-controlled implementation of a decentralized protocol. Just control both sides of the interface.
Decentralized protocols are a necessary but not sufficient condition for a lock-in-free experience.
But I think it’s important to understand that Bluesky has, effectively, created a technological poison pill: by building on an open protocol, ATprotocol, the system itself can be rebuilt outside of Bluesky, but in a way where everyone can continue to communicate, and that creates incredible incentives that undermine any evil billionaires, and would actually punish Bluesky (or anyone else!) should they try to enshittify.
Bruh, ActivityPub is right there, and we already have places where people can communicate. And it’s already built in such a way that anyone can make use of it. Currently not so with ATprotocol.
When BlueSky has interoperable servers that anyone can spin up, then this conversation is worth having, but if the protocol at all requires “the next person” to have tons of investment capital to get things running again, it’s still just a billionaire-buyout away.
To be fair ActivityPub is a pretty shitty protocol in terms of scaling up with all the quadratic communication and caching growth it requires. Not that ATprotocol is better, just that there is room for improvement on ActivityPub before it could be used on a world-wide scale for the entire human population the way major social media sites are right now.
all the quadratic communication and caching growth it requires.
I have trouble visualizing and understanding how the Internet works at scale, but can generally grasp how page-by-page or resource-by-resource requests work. I struggle to understand how one could efficiently parse the firehose of activity coming from every user on every instance that your own users follow, at least in user-focused services like Mastodon (or Twitter or Bluesky). With Lemmy, there will be many more people following the biggest communities with the most activity, so caching naturally scales. But with Twitter-like follows of individual accounts, there are going to be a lot of accounts on the long tail, with lots of different accounts being followed only by a few people. The most efficient method is to just ignore the small accounts, but obviously that ends up affecting a large number of accounts. But on the other hand, keeping up with the many small accounts will end up occupying all the resources on stuff very few people want to see.
A centralized service has to struggle with this as well, but might have better control over caching and other on-demand retrieval of content in lower demand, without inadvertently DDoSing someone else’s server.
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You’re not wrong, and if BlueSky is so allegedly “philanthropic” (according to them), it’s not like they couldn’t have put their efforts towards improving ActivityPub instead, which is already resisting centralization from the likes of Meta.
And if they weren’t allowed to do so, due to some rule governing investment capital or shareholders, etc., therein lies their problem.
And unfortunately bluesky isn’t as decentralized as they may appear
Preach.
Bluesky has created the illusion of what we already have with the Fediverse.
Multiple incompatible flawed competing standards are essential for a success of any technology
Not sure it’s essential, but it seems the norm.
Anything that helps breaks the twit’s influence is useful for now, though.
Conflict of interest: Mike Masnick is on the Bluesky Board
How is that a conflict of interest? He’s explaining why Bluesky won’t be sold to a big tech company, and since he’s on the board, he should know
It can still be done and has been done before many times https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
It’s arguably already happening considering they’ve taken money from Blockchain Capital.
I mean, even Jack Dorsey left because he thought it wasn’t actually decentralized, and that guys a stupid asshole in it for all the wrong reasons.
That doesn’t really work when the overwhelming majority of the users are on bsky.social anyway. Like sure I have my own PDS so technically my data is mine, but if they decide to turn off ATproto it barely will have any effect at all for most Bluesky users.
One could argue the overwhelming majority of users is on mastodon.social.
Wishful thinking. Look at Wikipedia. Open everything, total content dumps available as single tarballs, “free the communities” as one of their founding tenets when it started, lots of spammy mirror sites, yet everyone is still stuck there. Main reason is the stupendous search rank makes everyone go there. This is one reason I decided to block search engines from my personal site. It’s ok, no one reads it either way.
Yeah, first-mover advantage is a thing.
