Bluesky Is Not Decentralized
208 comments
·October 26, 2024pfraze
IoI_xD
> We never said no algorithm. I don’t know where that meme comes from.
It comes from the people who don't know what an algorithm is but heard that Twitter has it and it's making them doomscroll so it's bad
(which is not to defend Twitter or other social media's algorithms, but to say that some people seem to have a blind hatred of them entirely due to misconceptions)
miki123211
And to be extra clear, "only show posts from people I follow, in chronological order" is an algorithm.
gary_0
We're also using an algorithm right now on HN, to sort comments and posts by freshness, votes, and reply count (plus manual moderation fairy dust sprinkled by dang and friends). Some people have even criticized it or dislike it, because everyone has different criteria for things they want to see.
It's easy to forget there's a gray area between "unsorted feed of all posts" and "nothing but insane rage-bait to maximize ad views".
squarefoot
That's so true. Could we then use a new word, say malgorithm to denote algorithms that don't work in the interests of users? Just as with we did with malware?
btw: The Malgorithm does actually exist, and ironically is the name of a electronic music device that applies bit-crushing (undersampling and/or bit resolution reduction) effect to audio signals, that is, it mostly makes the signal sound worse although it can be used creatively, which however occurs very rarely in pop music.
kalleboo
In common usage, there is a distinction between "an algorithm" and "the algorithm". The latter is often shortened to "the algo".
j_maffe
I'm sorry but your comment comes across as very pedantic. In the context of social media, people mean highly optimized algorithms for maximum retention.
arromatic
You expressed it perfectly in word which i couldn't. People's hate for algorithm is so weird . Without the algorithm they can never find quality or content they are interest in .
dbspin
Absolutey rock hard disagree. I'm old enough to remember when twitter and facebook used to both have a chronological feed without algorithmic sorting. Facebook (trash today of course) was an incredibly useful way to find out what your friends were doing on a given day by just reading the chronological feed. You could also trivially see which events were going on in your locality and which friends were attending. At the same time (2005 - 2012) Twitter was an incredible resource for real time news and reactions to what was happening. Without clickbait, commercial promotion or flame (culture) wars. The web pre-agorithm was gradually being subsumed by feed readers like Google Reader, where you'd browse longform articles and blog posts from people you'd found or been recommended by friends. There was no shortage of content. What was absent was 'brainrot', engagement bait, and all the vapid fluff that the 'algorithms' (tweaked entirely and completely to maximise engagement and advertising consumption - not to your preference) provide.
suprjami
The hate is for algorithms which fill your feed with useless shit that you didn't ask for, at the expense of things you did ask for, and which is intended to manufacture rage to get you commenting and arguing with others so the social network can shove an ad in your face.
That's the only kind of algorithm people have been exposed to, so they hate the term.
newsclues
The hate isn’t weird, it is earned!
One of the most important algorithms, google search, has become crap. Social media algorithms have become crap.
Average people hate “the algorithm” because it was a trusted friend(ly tool) ands it has become crap and betrayed them!
If we, technologists, want people to love and use algorithms, we have a duty to avoid making them become horrible or useless for people.
Certhas
That seems like wilfully ignoring what people are upset about by insisting on a superficial and literal reading of their complaints.
rsolva
The OP does not take issue with the algorithm part, but the claim of decentralization. I'm currently running my own instance of an ActivityPub server (GoToSocial), just for me, and it works like a charm. I would not know how to do the same with BlueSky, and I have tried to understand how.
pfraze
If you’re trying to self host your account, you follow https://atproto.com/guides/self-hosting
If you’re trying to build an application, you follow https://atproto.com/guides/applications
If you’re looking to run the bluesky application, you need to run the codebases in https://github.com/bluesky-social.
Matl
If mastodon.social shuts down tomorrow, my own instance continues to operate fully independently.
For PDS is that true? If bsky.app shuts down, will my PDS be able to function as an independent instance incl the web frontend etc.?
rsolva
Thanks, it's been a while since I last looked into it.
Will my self-hosted account be able to talk directly to other self-hosted BlueSky accounts?
brianolson
If you want to dedicate a VM to it, bsky Personal Data Server has a pretty easy install
jauntywundrkind
Thanks Paul & all.
I also enjoyed Brian Newbold 's post from early August taking inventory of how Bluesky is doing so far at being decentralizable, and what's remaining,
https://bnewbold.net/2024/atproto_progress/
There's some wildly negative often wildly in my view inaccurate posts down below slinging all kinds of things. So much of it is so wildly off base.
Atproto dev has a ton of strong wins already, and there's been a massive influx of dev interest in the past few weeks. Really looking forward to seeing this ecosystem bloom. I feel like we are at an inflection point.
Matl
> For DID PLC, the likely solution is to move the registry into a nonprofit which will maintain it, similar to ICANN.
ICANN is rather centralized. This is the biggest concern I have with ATProto, I would have expected it to work over P2P i.e. IPNS, or even some sort of a blockchain rather than a centralized web server.
packetlost
It's not really possible to avoid bootstrapping on a centralized authority in general, and DNS seems like a mostly reasonable backstop for that. As others have said, you can make your own DNS network and people have.
dartos
I central authority with escape hatches is okay, I think.
One could start their own DNS server with different records than the ICANN ones, thus ignoring their authority.
As long as that possibility exists, it’s fine.
Matl
The problem being that once that single authority becomes 'the standard' getting anyone to switch/use any alternative becomes almost impossible
There are many alternatives to (ICANN) DNS, but since none have support built into major browsers, they end up being a pain to use, which hampers adoption.
The most successful is probably the Onion network and that's far from mainstream.
evbogue
Yes, of course Bluesky is federated. The hosts hold onto your keypairs. The DID:PLC is a substring of your first hash.
For those of you who are interested in solving this my first suggestion is to read the Scuttlebot docs which are still up at: https://scuttlebot.io/
Sometimes I think about a retro Scuttlebot revival. If you want to set sail on this kind of project, contact info is in my bio.
selecsosi
Always liked the ssb protocol and had an account but am just not much of a poster to ever add much value. Appreciate the design and open build process. Been following for a long time, hope you are doing well
evbogue
Thanks! I'm well. Yes, Scuttlebot's offline-firstness and the friend of a friend replication strategy were ahead of their time.
Matl
To me the biggest problem with ATProto is to discover the current location of a user, you query https://web.plc.directory/resolve which is a centralized service
Second biggest is that while a PDS does decentralize the data, I belive bsky.app is still the place providing the 'frontend' that makes it all work.
Orthographic
(I've updated this post as I've learned more).
Thank you. ATProtocol is really cool, but I share some concerns about the centralized resolution of identities to custom servers and the conflict of interest in Bluesky's stewardship of ATProtocol development (what is good for the ATProtocol Network vs what is good for Bluesky).
If I understand Bluesky correctly:
When you follow users on Bluesky (even those on a hosted custom server), atprotocol allows you to follow them by a "URL" (DID:web) but by default you're following them by their DID:PLC, a kind of Decentralized Id that is resolved via an equivalent to a "name server" (see: https://github.com/did-method-plc/did-method-plc).
You give that name server a DID json representing a user you want to follow or are following, it will tell you the IP of the (custom atproto) server where that user's posts and replies are. By default Bluesky apps only know about PLC nameservers that are in Bluesky's registry.
And so even if I'm using custom hosting if Bluesky PLC nameserver delists my DID (or the nameserver that points to me?) most bluesky users will be unable to find me.
Bluesky is theoretically interested in moving this nameserver under a nonprofit consortium structure - where no one entity could prevent a nameserver from being listed - but no one is working on it, and BlueSky for years hasn't gotten around to it.
My questions are:
1. Is that right, or are there any promising nascent efforts to create a nameserver registry under a consortium structure?
2. Is it fair to ask users, potential users and developers to take it as an article of faith that BlueSky will fully support and partner with such a consortium (since it hasn't helped set one up already in the years of its development)?
3. If Bluesky has features that are not being "backported" to ATproto, does this not raise concerns about Bluesky's conflict of interest in its current stewardship of ATProtocol? One could imagine a situation where Bluesky "slow walks" contributions to ATProto out of its own private company interest in keeping its userbase on Bluesky servers.
steveklabnik
I don’t work for bsky, but pay a lot of attention:
1. Basically, yeah. That said, I still think it may be a bit early to do this. A consortium would be useful if it was meaningfully independent of bsky, so you need to grow and gain interest first. Otherwise the “independent group” would be run by the same people, which is pretty meaningless. Plus, working on that means les time for working on other things. I would expect to see this happen once there’s another non-toy atproto application, and for representatives from it to be involved too. Before then feels premature to me, but I can appreciate others may feel differently.
2. I do. The team has continually set out a vision, and then executed on it, over and over. Including following through on things that actively reduce their control over things. Tons of folks asked a similar question previously: “they’re saying that you’ll be able to host your own PDS someday, but do you trust them to actually ship that and not just say they’re gonna a do it and put it off forever and keep control?” And then they shipped it.
3. Any application has semantics built on top of the underlying protocol: that’s what an application is, in some meaningful sense. But I do agree that without independent governance for atproto, doing things like that could stifle other users of atproto, sure. We’re back in the same realm as 1, imho. I’m following the devs of various other apps and none of them have expressed that they think bsky is hoarding the goods so far, at least.
null
pxoe
Mastodon is not decentralized, it's federated. It doesn't solve some of the problems that come with centralization, it just creates more entities that will have the same problems (being at will of a server). And funnily, it doesn't even solve data portability entirely (you can't actually move your posts). Mastodon's "decentralization" is even worse than a "theoretical promise" of one, cause it's a just marketing promise when it literally just does not work that way in some aspects. You're still "centralized" to whatever server you signed up on, still with caveats that an actual centralized service would have. It's better, but it's truly not all it's made out to be. Definitely not to the point where such sneer and kind of just, speculatively making shit up, wouldn't look just ironic.
toofy
> it just creates more entities that will have the same problems (being at will of a server).
this isn’t a “problem” that needs to be solved. you’re not “at the will of the server” in a federated environment, its the actual literal opposite. if i don’t like the server operators or if i don’t like the servers it federates with, that’s totally ok. i start my own and federate with who i like.
this is a good thing, not a “problem.” the ability to freely move and the freedom to associate is incredibly important. and for some weird reason people keep pretending like these things aren’t important if it’s online. its ridiculous.
if i don’t want to spend my play time around eric, i should absolutely be able to move and play somewhere else without eric. that’s actual freedom. if you try to keep me in one place or force me to play with eric, you’re trapping me.
no, the ability to pick and choose how, why, where, and with who i spend my free time is important, its not a “problem”. that’s agency, and i wish people would quit arguing against agency and calling it a problem.
lukan
"if i don’t like the servers it federates with, that’s totally ok. i start my own and federate with who i like."
So everytime you move, can you take your existing network and posts and messages with you, or do you have to start from scratch every time?
ttepasse
You can take your existing network with you, Mastodon has Accounts redirects and follower migrations. Your own content not yet. While Mastodon-the-software has an export function, there is no import as yet. But that is a solvable problem.
toofy
well my comment was specifically pointing out that giving someone agency is the opposite of “a problem.” i was pointing out that having options to spend your freetime how and where you like is the literal opposite of forcing you to “the will of a server” or whatever their statement was.
to your comment, the ability to keep posts and such is going to vary by which system you’re using, for example:
- twitter, absolutely not. they want to force you to spend your free time around whoever they say. and they absolutely want to make it difficult for you to have freedom to leave or the freedom to associate. in the before times there were sites you could use to move your contacts and follow the same people on Mastodon. elon hated the idea of people having freedom so he shut that down shortly after he took power. for this reason i recommend people start manually building their contacts on other sites now so the move will be easier once you’re ready.
- threads, im not familiar enough with it yet to say for sure. i have a couple of accounts there but honestly, ill never use them, its zuckerberg… facebook… no thanks. been burned too many times by these people.
- Mastodon, almost entirely yes. you can backup and download both your posts and your contacts. i dont worry too much about it, but if it’s something you’re super worried about just do like we all do with photos, docs, etc… keep a backup. i know some people keep a backup federated account mirroring follows, etc… for worst case scenarios. i occasionally download my follows and posts, but im not really too worried about it.
- bluesky, yep. i love blue sky but for different reasons from Mastodon, i use them both all day long. just for different reasons. blue sky doesn’t at all have the same quality of community as Mastodon or even hn. it’s nice, but its not community focused. its more like twitter before eternal september took over. at the end of the day tho, i don’t have a lot of hope for it, the VC people will definitely figure out a way to ruin it.
but to bring it back to my original comment: the important part is that we have the agency to utilize freedom of movement and association. it should creep you out when someone tries to convince you that having agency is a problem. having freedom to jump from place to place, server to server, community to community is a good thing and its crazy when these people keep attempting to convince us that jumping around is "a problem".
when someone tries to force you to spend your playtime somewhere you don’t want to be, or when they try to convince you “no, you should want to be around eric especially when he’s a dickbag.” that should make your hair stand up with red flags. and that’s what these people have been trying to convince us for years—“noooo, why would you want to spend your free time somewhere else having fun? dont go enjoy yourself! you want to be here! no one here likes each other and everyone is screaming at each other! thats what you really want to do with your freetime!”
rtpg
"Being at will of a server" is always a problem, but with federation you can choose which server you are at the will of. You still need trust, but that trust can be chosen by you based off of your needs (and that trust can be placed in yourself). You're on a different part of the trust gradient.
Meanwhile there's a certain quality of service that can be obtained with "mere" federation that is much tougher for many decentralized strategies. The actual topology matters, but federation is a pretty decent model IMO! There's a reason that e-mail has been so useful as a system for so long!
lifthrasiir
And the federation also made the spam email problem a lot worse ;-)
Anyhow, federation should be seen as a part of specific strategy for decentralization; federation itself is not decentralization and cannot achieve it without more bits---like topological consideration. Many federated protocols tend to push those bits into the horizon and fail at scale when that horizon eventually approaches, while ATProto is at least explicitly constructed with eventual decentralization in the mind and seems to be fine for now. Mastodon will need to prove much more than ATProto in order to show that it's capable for eventual decentralization in contrast.
davexunit
Saying the fediverse is not decentralized is a wild take.
llm_trw
We've gone from digital totalitarianism to digital feudalism.
This does not seem like an improvement.
Terr_
Perhaps manorialism rather than feudalism, which implies certain bidirectional duties.
It may not be a huge improvement when identities and posts can't be migrated, but it's still an incremental one.
rtpg
I don't think that is correct? You can spin up your own instance and do stuff on it. The fact that some people want to share their resources isn't feudalism.
a2128
A federated network is a decentralized network. You're probably thinking of distributed networks, which federation is not.
zimpenfish
> (you can't actually move your posts)
You can export and import, I believe, for some instances but generically re-posting them to a new instance with the old date isn't currently feasible[0], correct.
You also need to re-federate them to get the "links" correct (and probably de-federate the old) which causes confusing results if your client doesn't handle backdated posts correctly (and most of the ones I was using in 2023 didn't.)
There's probably a solution[1][2] but I think it's something the ActivityPub people just haven't given much thought to just yet.
[0] No date field in https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/statuses/#create
[1] When I was importing a 10 year Twitter history to my Akkoma instance, I just tweaked the code to a) allow backdating posts, b) allow certain accounts to backdate posts and c) not federate backdated posts from those accounts. Doesn't really solve the full problem but worked for me.
[2] Obviously there's other problems such as people creating fake history, etc., if you're allowed to post backdated statuses.
simgt
> [2] Obviously there's other problems such as people creating fake history, etc., if you're allowed to post backdated statuses.
I don't think it's a problem really, but I may be mistaken about what the goal of these platforms is. I can also create a fake history on a blog or news site and backdate posts. But in the odd case where it matters, say for a copyright dispute or something, it'd be very hard to pretend that the history is legit and very easy to find clues that it is not.
zimpenfish
> I can also create a fake history on a blog or news site
Without the implied "authority" of something like Mastodon[0] or Twitter[1], or Facebook, etc. though. You can (currently) point to a post on a $BIGNETWORK and say "I posted that then" and be credibly believed. If you allow backdated (or timestamp-edited) posts, that goes out of the window, surely.
[0] Ok, not if you're running your own instance, obviously.
[1] Who resisted adding editing for years for similar reasons.
davexunit
Federation is a form of decentralization. It has its issues but it doesn't mean it isn't decentralized. Moving towards distributed, peer-to-peer applications is the path forward.
its-summertime
> BlueSky's big claim is [they have] "no algorithm".
https://bsky.social/about/blog/3-30-2023-algorithmic-choice Over a year ago, a blog claiming the opposite
> But the actual BlueSky app does not implement DIDs. It's called "did-placeholder" on their github. It's a stub. It's TBD. It's not a feature, it's a feature request.
AFAIK People with did:web dids can make accounts and use bluesky
> And guess who just bought a seat on BlueSky's board with a $15M Series A round? That's right, a crypto vulture named Blockchain Capital.
And one of the first investors was Jack Dorsey. They've used libraries and concepts that are only vogue amongst those with cryptography/cryptocurrency interests. This is not new, this is always been the case.
- - -
A person, any person, can join the relevant developer chats, or find and ask people who are working on or have brought up their own servers, about how centralized or decentralized bsky is, but that does not seem to be the case for this person's research.
davexunit
did:web is not a decentralized identifier. My understanding is that it was made for test suites but was taken out of that context for production uses.
its-summertime
While true, it aligns with did:web's goals with relation to services. Something the user can use to port themself across services, without the involvement of an app-specific discovery service.
As a result, if did:web can be well integrated into bluesky itself (it works across AT Proto already AFAIK, just not all parts of Bluesky's GUI, a current pain point), that should open the path to add additional discovery mechanisms like IPNS
pxoe
what does have a "big claim" that they have "no algorithm" is mastodon, which says so on its joinmastodon.org page and in its instance blurb. which just so obviously could not even possibly be true.
cuu508
The news feed in Mastodon is chronologic, it includes all posts from the accounts you follow (and have not muted).
pxoe
it's not even the follows feed, but suggestions and explore with its sections. like, explore feed of posts is just straight up an algorithmic assembly of posts. (looking at mastodon.social, "the original server") the explore feed has a blurb about "how it ranks posts" which is literally next to their "no algorithms in sight" tagline. do they think their users are stupid? or are they just fine with making such obvious lies?
Kye
Chronological sorting is an algorithm. You don't hear its dissenters as much, but it's not without issue. It's not always the best way to present things.
openrisk
It is interesting that nobody comments on the "ownership" data point of the post.
> And guess who just bought a seat on BlueSky's board with a $15M Series A round?
Yet that is the only thing that matters.
The technical pieces for a vast range of alternative designs for online interactions are already available. Decentralized, federated, distributed, peer-to-peer. Who cares? What matters is the outcome.
What is entirely missing in these silly "protocol wars" is any concrete and realistic vision of what that "good next generation Web" looks like, not technically, but economically, socially and politically. Who gets empowered and who gets exploited. Who gets (and how strong) a voice and who gets manipulated by that voice.
The prior norms, social contracts and institutions we used to have in the pre-digital era have been completely corrupted yet there is no visible replacement beyond some vague ideals.
The shape of the "next gen web" very much depends on who funds it, why (what incentives and expectations do they have) and how (what incentives and expectations do they create to the vast ecosystems of developers, entrepreneurs, moderators, users, etc).
alexch
[flagged]
jrm4
Bluesky's claims to why they're better than anything always sound like crazy pill stuff to me.
Other services both centralize identity AND algorithms/operations.
This seems to centralize identity WITHOUT the second thing, which strikes me as the worst of both worlds.
It's just, we've already mostly "solved" the centralized identity problem with EMAIL. As often, the key is "fail elegantly," not be bulletproof. Email, in it's federated state, allows for individuals to more or less choose what kind of centralization they want -- and more importantly, to kill and restart accounts if needed. Thus, Mastodon is the best parallel.
What am I missing? What is the advantage of bluesky here?
hoidofyolen
I don't have the energy to put all of the advantages and argue for them here, but take a look at https://atproto.com and maybe look around at other blog posts and articles that contrast atproto and ActivityPub. Might just have to do some research, since it's been talked about ad nauseam already in other spaces.
jrm4
I promise I'm not intentionally trying to play gotcha or anything like that, but if you're literally unable to rattle off something in a short space, my skepticism only deepens?
relaxing
> What is the advantage of bluesky here?
Fewer Nazis.
jrm4
Yeah, this is another issue entirely, but also very often wrong and misses the point.
Roughly, e.g. -- Twitter (nope not calling it X) is still overwhelmingly the most useful and productive place for Black+US Politics discussion. Despite, or even perhaps because of, the presence of bad guys.
The thing I hate the most about Mastodon (despite being the right model) is people trying to make it nice, but end up making it STERILE. The left leaning folks, who politically I generally strongly agree with, really do overdo it in terms of "shutting down disagreeable speech."
(Bluesky is similar to Mastodon here)
relaxing
What’s some of this disagreeable speech you’ve been shut down on.
moffkalast
I'm not sure how we can get the point that a centralized seamless UX experience is core to any platform though the thick skulls of people designing decentralized federated services.
Lemmy's active user number drops every month and as does Mastodon's by a lesser degree, both failing to get proper traction because they segment and wall off tiny gardens where nothing is happening, making sure that people waste time frequenting empty communities instead of merging it all together. Regardless of how the backend is handled, centralized or not, people need the same thing on the frontend. These valiant attempts at remaking popular sites for the people by the people are not only fighting every corporation that wants them gone as a concept but also their own dumb decisions, which will probably prove too much of a hurdle in the long run.
bbor
I wanted to like lemmy so bad. I lucked into a lifetime ban from Reddit after using it daily for 12 years, so you’d think it would be easy! But there’s just not enough people to make it interesting, not even close. I subbed to every damn instance I could find, and still no luck.
https://slrpnk.net is an exception in that it’s a cute place for activism and related news, but that’s obviously not the only thing I want to use the internet for, especially when I’m looking to relax.
So far, with an n of 5 days: BlueSky is what I was waiting for. Especially for scientific content - memes or otherwise!
timeon
> wall off tiny gardens where nothing is happening
This is actually reason why I like Mastodon. There is barely anything happening. I get content from few niches - but I do not need it to be generating something every minute. I have no time for that.
But for people who prefer old Twitter experience, BlueSky is pretty good.
moffkalast
I would go out on a limb and postulate that most people prefer lots of meaningless content. At least if the popularity of Tiktok is anything to go buy.
apitman
To date decentralization is inversely correlated to good UX.
* nostr is very decentralized (keys) and has terrible UX (manual management of keys).
* Mastodon is medium decentralized (dependence on DNS; can't migrate accounts) and has bad UX (confusion about which instance to use; "Take Me Home" to interact with anything).
* Bluesky (atproto) is moderately decentralized (did:plc) and has great UX.
The main advantage that atproto has over the other two is that if someone solves the did:plc problem, it can become the first very decentralized/great UX social media platform over night.
StellarStoic
Nostr's poor UX is a feature, not a bug. It serves as a reminder that life isn’t perfect.
Basic knowledge of manual key management should be essential for every internet user. Think about password managers.
What I love about Nostr is that individuals can actively participate in making it better. It’s fully open, allowing anyone to build whatever they wish on top of it. I agree it’s not perfect now, but it will improve over time and the progress already made can speak for itself that Nostr is here to stay and it's getting better and better each day. The more developers the Nostr ecosystem has, the faster it will evolve.
Personally, I enjoy using it. Cross-posting has been resolved, so I can’t even remember the last time I opened Twitter. Mastodon never really attract me much. Bluesky is yet another Twitter and it's not decentralized. They can read your DMs btw.
One of best features of Nostr is when you build something, you get users instantly and whenever I post on nostr I cross post to Mastodon and Bluesky as well. Reactions are also interchangeable :)
gr__or
I think there is an interesting piece to be written about how prone bsky is to being captured by a single entity. It would look at how the reality of PDS today is 99.9999% (not the actual number, but ballpark) bsky hosted, also true for the relay. Then it would outline EEE scenarios, their likelihoods and whether bksy is sufficiently decentralized to fend them off.
This post is not that and misses the mark for me.
colesantiago
Unfortunately close to nobody on or has moved to Bluesky cares about it being decentralized, they just want another Twitter that just works.
Most of the people on Bluesky that have moved are artists, academics, writers and creative folks that don't care about tech.
If they did care about decentralization they would be all going to Mastodon right now, but there isn't any traction there in the millions.
brianolson
95% of end users don't care; but Bluesky has the right bits built in anyway. There's a grand central aggregator of all 13 million accounts, but it's not _special_, someone else could run one (several hobbiests are processing this level of data). Migration works* (and works better than Mastodon, all your history and network move even better than a masto server move) (*okay, it's a weird command line tool at the moment, but as soon as someone cares that'll get cleaned up). You can run your own Personal Data Server and hook it in to the bsky network and then everyone can see your posts and interact with them. It's newer, only a couple years old, but all the right parts are headed in the right direction.
jahnu
Close to nobody should need to understand what decentralisation means. This was/is a problem with Mastodon. When it was new it required understanding things most people didn’t want to know and arguably shouldn’t need to know.
pfraze
I’m not sure that’s true. We have a lot of people who are invested in the protocol and the technology. I post threads about it periodically, and people are pretty engaged & excited: https://bsky.app/profile/pfrazee.com/post/3l6xwi52zti2y
Nursie
Outside of tech circles I think that’s generally true. Few people understand what it means for something to be decentralised and fewer people are idealistic enough to care if it means compromising on features.
It’s all about the user experience. See also privacy and security.
threeseed
Bluesky = 13m users, Mastodon = 9m users.
Bluesky hasn't released what their DAU/MAUs are but Mastodon's aren't that bad.
https://bsky.social/about/blog/10-24-2024-series-a https://mastodon-analytics.com
colesantiago
Bluesky has 1.43M daily active users on average and 6M monthly actives.
https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.d...
Mastodon has dropped to 800K monthly actives and has no data on daily actives which I would assume that number would be even lower.
Not a good look for Mastodon, considering that huge drop of 400K monthly users on that active users chart and did not recover even after Elon's changes to X, the majority of X users in Brazil chose Bluesky and ignored Mastodon.
pfraze
More like 2.25mm DAU actually
AlexAplin
Watching the firehose events they're probably clearing Mastodon for now. We'll see how that looks after it stabilizes again, the surges tend to have pretty steep dropoffs so far.
https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.d...
amatecha
Dunno, this account[0] says Mastodon has 15.5m users, says it pulls from https://instances.social/ .. no clue how reliable/accurate their data is though.
[0] https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount/11327098336778135...
isodev
Can we actually count the number of instances and users on Mastodon (the fediverse)? I have alt accounts in at least two separate "bubbles" of servers that only federate with each other and wouldn't show up in stats like this.
notpushkin
This is a rather tricky question. What does count as the fediverse in the first place?
kfrzcode
X seems to be working quite well. Especially considering the significant reduction in overhead since Elon's purchase.
timeon
Anyone on internet can see this Mastodon post with comments. Unfortunately X is only able to display it all to logged-in users. Old Twitter was able to display it to anyone as well. Seems like X is in austerity mode.
croes
Do you mean technically or financially?
badrequest
This is a ludicrous paranoid screed that, thanks to the nature of Mastodon, will not be on the live internet in a decade's time.
ck2
People are going to nit-pic and while some of the concerns have some weight to them, so far they are trivial IMHO
The fact is we need an alternative to X because the current owner has done and will continue to do terrible things not just to the service but apparently on a personal and political level that is beyond distasteful to a HUGE chunk of the users (if not even greater than 50%)
And Threads isn't going to cut it for similar reasons.
So in an imperfect world Bluesky is what we get and it's a legit alternative that's better.
The fact a Mastodon<->Bluesky bridge exists says A LOT. Good luck ever getting something like that with X without paying a literal fortune for it.
BlueTemplar
Bluesky, being by Twitter founders, isn't that much better in this sense than Threads/Facebook/Meta.
And the biggest issue with Xitter still isn't Elon Musk (have you forgotten the "Trump years" already ?), but because the way how that media works is turning discussions into flamewars, and its users into morons (including Musk, who reportedly was hooked on it long before he bought it). It's especially concerning when journalists (who really should know better) and politicians use it.
That blame lies very much on Twitter's founders.
null
Read this: https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers
AT Protocol works like the Web, where each user is a website and each application is a search engine. The apps crawl the network of hosts and aggregate activity. We have over 100 outside hosts and at least 3 aggregating apps out there. It’s a different model than ActivityPub, which is more akin to email.
We never said no algorithm. I don’t know where that meme comes from. We have an open system for algorithms, which we and 3p devs can operate. We have a default algorithm for every user called Discover. It was one of our main concerns to have an answer to algorithms in a decentralized network.
For DID PLC, the likely solution is to move the registry into a nonprofit which will maintain it, similar to ICANN. We also support the Web DID method, and if folks like this remain concerned we’re open to other DID methods. It’s important, but roughly similar to DNS or TLS issuers; supporting infra to the application network.