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IMHO: 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

BlueskyFederation Architecture Overview - BlueskySoon, we’re launching a sandbox environment for federation. In advance, we want to share some technical details about our design decisions.

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.

@jwildeboer you can absolutely run your own relay and people have already done that for testing at least

@mackuba Sure. At some point in the future all of Bluesky will be fully decentralised and reach federation levels that the ActivityStream already has ;) And that point is a moving target since years.

@jwildeboer I won't argue that it isn't as decentralized in practice as AP right now, I'm just saying that "they promise that in future you might be able to run your own relay" is misleading, because you can do that today

Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:

@mackuba And, as you said, that is for testing ATM. And the other argument with the did:plc still stands. Anyway, right now Bluesky is by all practical means centralised and I am not convinced that will really change. ATProto stays a proprietary, non-open standard, owned by a non-open organisation, not a community or SSO (Standard Setting Organisation) IMHO.

@mackuba "The author mentions that setting up a Relay requires around 4.5 TB of disk space, and that it’s growing by around 18 GB a day. However, that was said before the most recent bump in growth. The data and processing requirements will only accelerate as more people use the service." - anderegg.ca/2024/11/15/maybe-b

anderegg.ca · Maybe Bluesky has “won”
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