Bluesky is technically decentralized, since it’s built on top of the AT Protocol, but users who sign up for Bluesky (which is still invite-only) still must sign up via the company’s main bsky.social network.
so… not decentralized as of now?
Yup. I moved to Mastodon because of it, I don’t trust BlueSky.
I don’t trust a platform that is funded by the guy who gladly sold the previous one to the moron who’s now in charge. And I don’t trust their claims because as of now decentralized it isn’t. It’s just not. And there is no real reason for them to do so. So eventually they may just walk back their claims and 99% of the user base won’t care about this.
Plus, this website is going to need to make money eventually. But as of yet, they have no concrete monetization plan, which is basically the norm in nowadays with these kinds of projects. We grow fast, we make money later. How is that going to happen? Is it going to be filled with ads? Is it going to basically make the same mistakes as before? We don’t know.
Plus again, this is originally made and funded by the guy who made Twitter. And let’s not pretend that Twitter wasn’t already a dumpster fire before the Muskrat came in. It was. Twitter sucked way before this and, personally, I left it waaaay before this guy came in.
I’m done, personally. I’m done with all of this. If a company is public, I don’t even care about their product anymore. Investors are going to ruin it. Doesn’t apply here, good. If a social media platform is not decentralized, not open source, I don’t want to have anything to do with it anymore. So, no Bluesky I’m done with all of that.
I am on Mastodon and I’m happy with my choice. And that’s it for me. I’m not trying anything else. I’m happy on there. It’s not filled with ads. I don’t have to worry about investors fucking ruining it eventually. And I don’t have to worry about it becoming a shithole filled algorithmically boosted Neo-Nazis because anger drives engagement and engagement makes money.
A while back, I was still hesitant. Then I read this article which basically sold me on it.
Jack Dorsey didn’t really have a choice since Twitter is a public company and he made an offer that was way over the per share price. If he refused to sell, the stockholders could have filed a lawsuit for not acting in their best interest.
it’s just a lie by a corperation. don’t trust it
BSky is the media’s favourite, so of course they’re doing the PR campaign.
@throws_lemy @noodlejetski The registry still is centralized, but the users already are distributed across multiple servers that talk to each other using that protocol.
That just sounds like standard scaling. No big Plattform is running on one server with one instance
@notepass No. In difference to regular scaling you can see the host of your account. These are separate systems that communicate via Bluesky’s protocol and not via the regular scaling mechanisms.
can users in other instances talk with people in bluesky?
No because it’s not decentralized. That’s like saying Twitter is decentralized because it’s microservices communicate over https.
That’s what I wanted to ask. Last time I heard about their federation, their team were claiming the tests are underway in a sandbox or something. I wonder how that’s going.
@loki @dawnerd Well, since the accounts are now moved to their specific hosts, you can use these hostnames instead of the generic one when using their protocol. The only action where you currently still need the generic bluesky host name (bsky.app) is during some account related activities.
The different hosts already talk to each other using the same protocol that is already in use for third parties who interact with bluesky (like alternate clients or custom feeds). The only thing that currently prevents “real” decentralization is the user registry.
From the outside it appears as if it all was some monolithic block. But this is only the case since the default usernames are using the
bsky.socialhostname. But in fact you can already use your own hostnames for your account, since the account is not locked to any hostname but to some unique hash. (Which is one of the advantages of their protocol and which we really should implement in the Fediverse as well to perform real account portability)
@loki What do you mean exactly with “other instances” in this context?
Interesting. I don’t fully understand the mechanics behind it but it certainly sounds a bit different then the usual
@throws_lemy @noodlejetski Some more background concerning the decentralization:
github.com/bluesky-social/atpr…
Wait, I thought the decentralized version of Twitter was Mastodon
It is. BlueSky or for short BS (ha!) just took the open standard and closed it again!
The article isn’t quite clear on if this is a Twitter subsidiary, or actual competition.
Yea that’s a bad title
Offshoot
Was it initially a spin off or something?
Jack Dorsey, formerly head of Twitter, sits on the board for blue sky, which is not related to Twitter.
It was originally a Twitter project, but it clearly didn’t get included in the sale. It was Jack’s “offload the cost of hosting social media to others, while retaining all of the revenue generating abilities for the company” Hail Mary.
Then the big doofus came along and threw so much money at him.
It’s a bit of a confusing history. The AT Protocol for decentralization was a side project of Twitter that later spun off, grew, and became Bluesky.
It also gets “decentralisation” wrong.
Seriously why is Bluesky not open for everyone? Do they have issues with scaling?
I doubt it, this is to trick the user into thinking they’re special because they managed to get in
If they had 10k users I won’t suspect a dark pattern, but 2 million ?! That’s to lure people into joining
@sculd @throws_lemy They are a really small company. So their resources are limited. For example until they started the internal decentralization, they had got a single Postgres database for everything.
I keep reading about bluesky on here, and here on bluesky. But calling it decentralised is wrong.
🤖 I’m a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:
Click here to see the summary
Bluesky, a decentralized social media app alternative to X (formerly Twitter), has announced that it has now crossed 2 million users — doing so just two months after crossing 1 million users.
The company is also finally about to add a public web interface, which might help make it a more attractive destination for journalists and other users.
One big hurdle for Bluesky to reach a bigger audience is that people can’t view links to posts without being signed in, so the upcoming public web interface should finally help alleviate that problem.
The public interface is slated for launch “around the end of this month,” according to the company’s blog post.
A federated network would allow users to post through various providers instead of a large central platform like most big social media companies.
Right now, Mastodon is the most prominent decentralized Twitter-like platform that already openly supports multiple providers and has attracted a lot of journalists and professionals.
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