Just answer me this one simple question, why would Bluesky meaningfully decentralize when that threatens all of the most lucrative funding models for their product?
More importantly why should I trust the company Bluesky just because of positive anecdotes and descriptions about employees who can be replaced with a flick of a finger?
Until they decentralize meaningfully, this is just marketing people describing phantoms in the sky.
Otherwise someone else could fork it and replace them.
It’s decentralised in theory just not in practice because of them owning all the relays and appview.
Exactly, ads (or other lucrative monetization schemes) are a form of micro-agression, you have to force them on people and that requires bottlenecks and centralized control.
The only thing I can say, it’s always better to use Bluesky instead of the Musk or Zuckerbot crap, not more. It’s not really descentralized, because all instances are depending on one company, they are not independent like Mastodon, Lemmy or other Fediverse sites.
I think this is a case of “Perfect is the enemy of good enough”.
Very interesting read, don’t miss the follow-up: https://dustycloud.org/blog/re-re-bluesky-decentralization/
Thanks, this seems like a must-read!
Thanks for posting this.
I think INS said it best
Of course, the corpo-silos are attuned to the phenomenon, trying to adapt their marketing lingo with cool buzz words like “Federated”, “Decentralized” and so on… Some nerds who fell for it jumped from one corporate hell-hole into another, are asking us to give them 30 million dollares americanos. This amount is needed to add “fire exits” to bluesky (AKA, to decentralize it). You know, in case the silo turns out to be ehm… well another silo. After all, we can’t just use anything to talk to each other: It has to have a je ne sais quoi of sex-appeal!
https://networkcultures.org/geert/2025/01/30/join-global-switch-day-on-february-1st-2025/
