IMHO: #BlueSky isn't decentralised or federated. The outage on 2024-11-14 is obvious proof. It may *look* decentralised and they definitely love to outsource traffic/storage costs by claiming that running your own PDS (Personal Data Server) is somehow something federated, but that's all smoke and mirrors. You have to go deep on [1] to find "networking through Relays instead of server-to-server" as their current implementation choice. THEY run the relays. No one else.
[1] bsky.social/about/blog/5-5-202…
Federation Architecture Overview - Bluesky
Soon, we’re launching a sandbox environment for federation. In advance, we want to share some technical details about our design decisions.Bluesky
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Aral Balkan
in reply to Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange: • • •Oblomov
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Aral Balkan
in reply to Oblomov • • •Shine McShine
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Gareth Kitchen
in reply to Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange: • • •Indeed. I’m not going read that again but when I had a look at the protocol a couple of years ago it was obvious, to me back then, that the entire platform was all geared up for monetization. It’s distributed claims are geared more to the processing of user data rather than distributed in the Fedi sense. For processing ID, content, advertising markers etc. All disastrous for privacy etc.
However. All that aside. The onboarding is slick. Finding people is easy. Starter packs are inspired. It’s a direct replacement for Twitter. It looks and feels how Twitter used to be a decade ago. Without ads too.
FediThing 🏳️🌈
in reply to Gareth Kitchen • • •"Without ads too."
Bluesky have already said they are fine with ads, so presumably this will appear in the future when they feel they've attracted enough users to start enshittifying.
On the slickness, that's a result of the tens of millions of dollars poured into them by Blockchain Capital in exchange for partial ownership. But that also means they have to enshittify.
Rob
in reply to Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange: • • •This is a question from someone who uses a host service for my Mastodon node.
I tried setting up a relay on my tiny instance and the server instantly had issues. So, in practice, Mastodon relays don't work for me. To that end, I believe my Mastodon setup is close to this diagram. No?
FediThing 🏳️🌈
in reply to Rob • • •It depends on which relay you use, the general relays can totally overwhelm small instances.
However, there's a relay service at relay.fedi.buzz which is more suited to small servers as you can follow narrower relays based on specific hashtags.
#FediBuzz Relay
relay.fedi.buzzRob
in reply to FediThing 🏳️🌈 • • •@FediThing
Yeah. This is the relay that is supposedly for small instances and brought my server to its knees very quickly.
FediThing 🏳️🌈
in reply to Rob • • •Rob
in reply to FediThing 🏳️🌈 • • •@FediThing
Good question. I probably did something stupid because I didn't know. Maybe I tried to do too many tags, in addition to volume. I don't actually remember. All I know is that I crawled over to my settings, deleted the relay and my instance came back to full speed.
So, to your point, it was probably me and not the relay. 😩
FediThing 🏳️🌈
in reply to Rob • • •@rob
Ahhh, right. Yeah, there is a warning on Fedibuzz against using it for too many tags:
"Is it cool to follow a few thousand tags/instances to build my own firehose?"
"Please don't, it's inefficient. Take a look at #FediBuzz' federated timeline API instead: fedi.buzz/api/v1/streaming/pub…"
Sebastian :coffefied:
in reply to Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange: • • •It's also not running on thin air, but uses VC money and that money will request a profit at some point.
They can't make profit on a free service, so at some point they will sell it or implement some of the shitty tactics of crypto boys (CEO, Dorsey) or they will skim the data themselves and sell it to the highest bidder.
Nothing on the Internet is free. I'm amazed people fall for it again and again...
FediThing 🏳️🌈
in reply to Sebastian :coffefied: • • •Also, the BlueSky staff have been paid in equity in the company so if Google or Microsoft or whoever bought BlueSky, the staff would each be winning the lottery. (That's why Twitter took Musk to court to force him to take over, because Twitter wanted their massive post-takeover payouts.)
In other words the financial structure of BlueSky is encouraging its staff to make a network that can be sold easily. This is the opposite to what the Fediverse aims for, which is to prevent any buyouts of the network.
If BlueSky truly decentralised, it would discourage takeovers and put staff payouts at risk.
Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:
in reply to Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange: • • •It's well hidden, but in Bluesky the Relay system, AppView and identity layer PLC are centralised parts.
The posts you see come from the AppView. The AppView gets its data from the Relay. The Relay gets its stuff rom the PDSes. So you always go through the relay. No direct connection from AppView to PDS. Yes, they promise that in future you might be able to run your own relay. But right now and since its inception, Bluesky runs the relay system you connect to. I call that centralised.