Bluesky Is Not Decentralized
91 comments
·October 26, 2024pfraze
Orthographic
Thank you. So if I understand you correctly:
Bluesky has DID PLC - formerly DID placeholder (see: https://github.com/did-method-plc/did-method-plc) which is the DID equivalent of a single "domain registrar" where BlueSky is the registrar. Bluesky also controls the ATProto repo and website (and presumably other AT Protocol assets like trademarks?)
There is currently no institution like ICANN structurally set up to be a neutral "registry of registrars" and owner of "ATProtocol."
Having that institution is something Bluesky says they wish would happen (or have been planning to do but never got around to?) and assert that they would hop right on board with but it just hasn't happened yet. And there is no one working right now to make it happen.
My questions are:
1. Is that right, or are there any promising nascent efforts to develop such a registry of registries?
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)? What about in light of Bluesky features that have not been "backported" to ATproto?
3. Once Bluesky has a large enough userbase (far beyond those that joined just for the decentralization) and is a private company, are its incentives aligned with increasing centralization to lock those users in or decentralization to allow them to leave?
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".
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 .
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.
Certhas
That seems like wilfully ignoring what people are upset about by insisting on a superficial and literal reading of their complaints.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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kristo
I don’t understand what the naysayers want? They want an app that is decentralized, completely free, uses nothing remotely related to crypto, doesn’t serve ads, and where it starts day 1 with a robust ecosystem of applications using it.
These people are just winging for followers IMO.
meibo
I think you just described the fediverse. The naysayers want you use to use the fediverse instead of centralized crypto stuff.
badgersnake
A social network that’s not controlled by, or potentially controlled by a billionaire.
The traits required to become a billionaire are not the traits required to run a social network. This should be obvious by now. Zaphod Beeblebrox had no actual power for a reason.
Aeolun
I mean, I very much desire the ‘not crypto’ part of that. All the rest is optional. Facebook is better than crypto.
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.
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.
llm_trw
We've gone from digital totalitarianism to digital feudalism.
This does not seem like an improvement.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
jeroenhd
Bluesky's marketing is rather annoying on my opinion. They're not defederated in practice and they probably never will be, but that's okay. People don't want a new Mastodon, they want a new Twitter after Musk fucked that up worse than ever.
Their promises of portability may ring empty but so far their lack of AI algorithm and ad feeds are what people actually come to Bluesky for
If you want federation, ActivityPub is there and ready to go. You could probably hack together a bidirectional Bluesky <-> Mastodon bridge without too much effort (requiring an account on BS to post from Mastodon) and enjoy the portability of your main account while also being able to follow your friends and such on BS.
MiguelX413
I ultimately came to the conclusion that both those who advocated for the fediverse as a Twitter replacement and those who complained that it was inadequate as a Twitter replacement were both wrong. People don't need “a Twitter” in the first place. It's a terrible website designed to maximize engagement, including negative engagement, for its profit.
I quite agree with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38445649
threeseed
> terrible website designed to maximize engagement
It really does show why engagement should never be monetised.
It's just full of fight videos, repackaged memes, controversial takes etc. all designed to get some extra money for the poster. Even VCs and the startup community gets in on it.
GaryNumanVevo
see: BridgyFed
exodust
[flagged]
threeseed
I just tried signing up for X using a new account.
99% ultra-right wing political content with obscene amounts of overt racism, anti-semitism etc.
Even though when it asked for my interests politics wasn't even an option.
innocentoldguy
How did Musk "fuck [Twitter] up worse than ever"? It has more functionality and is more stable since Musk bought it.
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.
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
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.
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...
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
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.
maxlin
X clones gonna X clone
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.