Bears repeating: it's not.
this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2025
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π» "it's not. it's not. it's not. ..."
π» "it's not. it's not. it's not. ..."
π» "it's not. it's not. it's not. ..."
/j
Yes, and it's inherently designed not to be.
But it also bears repeating that decentralization by itself has no advantage, either.
But it also bears repeating that decentralization by itself has no advantage, either.
Could you expand on that?
Oh damn, that's a lot of cross-posts. I didn't know this had already been posted so many times before.
Yeah its a great read that people enjoyed a lot.
One of the best parts is where she explains that bluesky cant scale down. You can run an activitypub server on a literal potato by design, but bluesky can't ever be decoupled from it's "eye of god" central architecture. The best case scenario for atproto federation is wikipedia or the Internet archive hosting a competing federated instance, but neither have stepped into that "millions/month" role.
I think the head technical lead at bluesky responded in a very respectful and technical way and did cop to some limitatoons why highlighting blueskys strengths. That reply is here.
Thank you so much for the additional context!
I've never felt inclined to regard bluesky with hostility, but definitely wouldn't call myself a fan; honestly that was a really thoughtful reply and improved my impression of bluesky as a platform
I hope they can avoid the pitfalls of venture capital funding and build a platform that doesn't suck, even if mastodon will be my microblogging home on the internet :)
How is Mastodon? I'm a bit new to Fediverse and I've been wanting to try multiple things in everything really.
I really like it personally, but I've heard some folks have somewhat mixed experiences with it
I think it's more of a different kind of Internet culture from Twitter than lemmy is from reddit (in both cases I'm ignoring obvious political differences)
Some folks have reported having experiences with that culture clash or crummy instance leadership. I never used twitter but I've heard it's more serious of a platform and culture (which in part might be that it's a fairly political culture like lemmy is).
All of that sounds negative but that's all second hand, my experience has been wonderful π . Granted, I mostly just use it to tell people I think their art is pretty and occasionally chat with splatoon folks (a competitive game I like). But I know lots of folks are very happy with it.
Like with much of the fediverse, getting unlucky and picking an instance that has leadership issues can cause problems for you, and picking a bigger instance generally gets you a kind of a more "vanilla" experience, but doesn't lean into the decentralized benefits of the fediverse as much. And Mastodon, although not as big as corporate platforms, is a fair bit bigger than lemmy/kbin I think
I have a bunch of lemmy accounts on various and have bounced around between them figuring out where I wanna be (thinking I might switch back to lem.ee), but with Mastodon I just picked mastodon.online and have never had any real issues so that's where my account is :)
Edit: actually, I wish the character limit is longer. I type too much (as you can see lol) and I'm not used to having a limit cause I never used twitter π
Hope this helps, if you have any particular questions feel free to ask βΊοΈ
Thank you for this comment! βΊοΈ
I'm really glad you appreciated it! I've seen a good handful of yours I've appreciated- I'm glad I could do the same βΊοΈ
Thank you for the reply! will definitely check it out then.
You're so very welcome, I hope your experience is as positive as mine!
Take care friend π
And Mastodon is decentralized in a way that makes it so people don't want to join the platform, so... To BlueSky we go!
If things were decentralized in similar way to crypto it would be way better for user adoption. The server side stuff is decentralized separately from the stuff users interacts with, so users can use a bunch of different websites to interact with the server side stuff, but they're always using the same credentials no matter the website they use and no matter the website they can interact with everything that ever happened on the servers, no one has the power to prevent users from seeing some of the transactions that happened (no admins) because the website they use are just a front used to simplify interaction with the servers.
[β¦] theyβre always using the same credentials no matter the website they use and no matter the website they can interact with everything that ever happened on the servers, no one has the power to prevent users from seeing some of the transactions that happened (no admins) because the website they use are just a front used to simplify interaction with the servers. [β¦]
Hm, IIUC, this is one of Bluesky's issues that the linked blog post was pointing out β if joining the network requires one to mirror all existing data, it makes it prohibitively expensive for anyone to spin up a server to join the network if the size of the network is enormous.
It could be done without having to clone all data though. Reddit is hosted by AWS and their data is distributed on multiple servers, so replace AWS by a bunch of people like you and me providing disk space for the data and tada, you can decentralized the database and just give people access to interacting with it directly (through code) or via various front-ends that people would create.
From a user perspective the front-end they use would be like Reddit before the API bullshit, it's just them using an app or a website to make things look good, but they have access to everything that's in the database and they're using the same credentials no matter which front-end they use.
The difference with Reddit is that since the hosts are just that, hosts to the data, they don't have admin power over users. They can filter the data that's hosted on their servers (like admins need to do now) but that content might be hosted by another server instead and they can't ban a user from the website itself since they don't control it (hence the crypto analogy, you can run a node, but it's just you adding one more server to the bunch, you don't have any real power over what's happening).
If things were decentralized in similar way to crypto it would be way better for user adoption.
IIUC, are you perhaps referring to something like Nostr?