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So why does everyone keep referring to Bluesky as decentralized or even comparable to the fediverse
Bluesky is the newest iteration of privately owned and controlled social media
Because silicon valley thinks it can define reality however it wants and keep telling us not to believe our lying eyes.
Weirdly this seems to work better on techy people who don't like thinking about politics but understand the technical details of this extremely well than it does on normie progressives because progressives just see the obvious predatory reality and don't get distracted in minutiae connected to very obviously empty promises.
The tech press does not ever talk to progressives though...
Does it? None of my normie progressive friends are on the fediverse. The ones that tried it didn't like it.
The tech press is talking to your normie friends?
No I’m saying the logic and propaganda of corporate social media seems to work on them, despite it being in obvious contrast to their ideals.
They didn't mean those kind of progressives. Not the political one. But the ones that actually see beyond VC backed big tech.
I'm not sure I see the distinction you're making here. Usually those groups are highly overlapping.
🤷
So why does everyone keep referring to Bluesky as decentralized or even comparable to the fediverse
They call it marketing, I call it propaganda.
"It's the same picture."
Always has been. The only difference is what they're selling.
I feel like this speaks to an unchallenged myth in our society. That corporate organizations and government organizations are somehow completely categorically different from one another such that they exist in totally separate spheres of reality. But they're both political groups of people, exercising power over the peasants. It's not as different as people think. And they often have similar goals and use similar strategies, like propaganda, to achieve them.
So why does everyone keep referring to Bluesky as decentralized or even comparable to the fediverse
Parrot the marketing hyperbole.
The enshitification continies.
Because it is decentalised, and beats the fediverse in many aspects.
It's not:
In July 2024, running a Relay on ATProto already required 1 terabyte of storage. But more alarmingly, just a four months later in November 2024, running a relay now requires approximately 5 terabytes of storage. That is a nearly 5x increase in just four months, and my guess is that by next month, we'll see that doubled to at least ten terabytes due to the massive switchover to Bluesky which has happened post-election. As Bluesky grows in popularity, so does the rate of growth of the expected resources to host a meaningfully participating node.
Because, despite being wildly impractical, it's technically built on tech that COULD be decentralized. Only recent a new host launched called Black sky. So it is no longer just one host. But it's been one host for so long it almost doesn't matter because so few people will switch.
Because, despite being wildly impractical, it’s technically built on tech that COULD be decentralized.
Yes exactly, it reminds me of the logic of cryptocurrency boosters. I just found out that the bluesky CEO (not to mention jack dorsey) are both crypto advocates so it makes a lot more sense now.
Doesn't BS have things in it's software that are hard coded to the main server, so it's not possible to make a completely independent host at the moment?
They continue to control 100% of the relays so they can control what servers are connected to the others.
Im trying to get more content on a few hobby communities on lemmy. I’m not really a big poster. I love to comment. But I’m willing to go through and start trying to build some momentum.
Awesome!
i'm so tired of these posts. okay, fediverse, you won! you are more decentralized than bluesky. maybe it's time to create real useful and interesting content instead of reveling in your elitism?
I mean I agree... it's kind of the constant crux isn't it?
The IT nerds pick a protocol that's uncontrolled, you need to select options and servers, because... well obviously that's kind of the definition of uncontrolled.
Some big name with big VC backing makes a big platform, makes it simple as possible, no choices, no control but good defaults. Average joes all flock there, build huge communities, users happy. Obviously the bulk of the creative types, celebrities etc... that most people care about flock there.
Big corp or VCs start demanding more monetization, or political censorship, or whatever kind of enshittification they inevitably always will. Users complain, but it all continues to amplify... open communities announce "hey we've got our alternative here", they say "thanks but nah that's too complicated, and you don't have the users that I want to see anyway". People complain more... and either adapt and accept the enshitification as normal... or maybe another big VC backed individual or other corp opens an alternative and pulls off the impossible critical mass goal, and process repeats.
I don't really know the solution, just know the pattern. Bluesky is IMO the new twitter... fundimentally I don't see it as super different than the old twitter. Only way I really see everything working is if say... a corporate backed giant actually played nicely and allowed interoperability with a federated protocol that's actually... well hostable.
It's basically like exactly what happens out in the real world... walmart comes offers better convenience and lower prices than local competitors... local economy adapts to walmart, individual stores shut down... half of owners, etc... forced to working for walmart for garbage pay.
I think the difference is that while other services boom and bust, the fediverse keeps growing slowly because it is decentralized, and can't be enshittified in the same way.
It is not as easy or attractive as Bluesky right now, but it keeps growing slowly and getting more kinds of people.
Maybe it won't be the network of choice for journalists, metal celebrities, etc, like twitter and bluesky, but it already is making its way as something more like old school tumblr -- some people like it, some don't.
But....I came here just for the gloating fediverse content.
What else could there be?
It would be fair to say something like that if you yourself made content but your last post was 3 months ago lol
first, no, it's fair to say regardless of how often i create content. posts like this is cancer, which adds nothing to the platform. second, even on this account my last post was 1 month ago.
It's information. YOU are the one deciding to make this a competition.
25% is too high, but at least it's not as embarrassing as 99%
True
Wait, there are 1600 BlueSky instances to join? Are they counting people using a custom domain name as an entire instance?
I suppose PDS instances are included: https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds
OK so it sounds like there is still just the single BlueSky that is "federated" with a handful of single-user BlueSkies?
Yes. The relevant metric:
99.55% of posts are on a single instance. That is not "federated" in any meaningful sense.
Anyone have the numbers for Lemmy specifically?
There are a lot of cool features from at protocol that activity pub should steal. The way users can pick their algorithm is game changing
The tradeoffs Bluesky made to achieve that means that Bluesky doesn’t have private posts. In fact, Bluesky doesn’t have private blocks.
Private posts is planned, but it's not trivial. Mastodon can't exactly brag about their nonintuitive technically just not broadcasted posts, where multiple implementations keep making private messages publicly discoverable due to bugs.
I do enjoy how that couch fucking fascist cunt is the most blocked person.
Which server is representing 25% of the index on the Fediverse?
I guess mastodon.social
Lemmy.world
If your idea of a federated Twitter is a bunch of mini-Twitters that sometimes exchange indirect replies or something, then the Fediverse fulfills that purpose completely. Mission accomplished, we can all go home now.
If your idea is that the replies to every post look the same to any user, anywhere, at any time, even the thing Mastodon merged half a year ago that supposedly fetches all replies if you remember to navigate to the topmost post, and wait up to 15 minutes for your view of the thread to coalesce, falls short.
And this is why hosting Mastodon is cheap, it fundamentally cannot provide the functionality BlueSky offers. Of course, you might think that such functionality is not desirable anyway, and that's entirely fair. But if you're looking for the immediacy that centralized Twitter gave users, I don't see a way for Fedi to ever provide that, whereas there is a path to BlueSky decentralization. It's a fact that your UX is diminished if all of your followers and followeds are not on the same instance.
But in the end, I think there is space for both.
If your idea is that the replies to every post look the same to any user, anywhere, at any time
This is only true of Bluesky because everyone is using Bluesky's infrastructure at the moment. If Bluesky ever deindexes someone and they start posting to an alternative relay, you suddenly don't have a guarantee of a full view of a post's replies.
Content addressing means you can make your instance pull from both their relay and the bluesky relay and trivially merge threads and views without consistency issues, so that's solvable.
The bigger issue is all those other regular users who doesn't, and still get confused (unless they manage to pick a client app that does it for them)
I mean, this would become less trivial the more replays go into use, where to get a full view you'd have to pull from all the relays that exist.
ActivityPub's solution to this is just IMO better, the original post has a replies collection attached to it that acts as the authority the replies the post has. This also allows creators to eject replies from the collection. There are issues with the way fedi software currently handles fetching from these reply collections, but the missing replies thing is very solvable in ActivityPub.
Doing it this way is why small instances gets hammered when a user's post goes viral.
And as for moderation bluesky also carries information with the top post from the post author and allows hiding replies too, etc. This gets enforced on the appview side, so the posting user's PDS is unscathed if it goes viral.
Bluesky is built to assume a handful of big relay (remember that a relay can merge in contents of another) and a bunch of appview and a ton of PDS servers, feed generators, moderation labelers, etc.
Realistically, the relay network will likely end up voluntarily adopting a tree topology - hobbyist communities would run small relays bundling all activity from members' PDS servers, then a larger relay in front gathers everything from a ton of smaller relays and makes it available to appviews
Doing it this way is why small instances gets hammered when a user’s post goes viral.
Setting up caching in the reverse proxy layer would alleviate this a lot of this. Like, GoToSocial only recommends to set up caching for the key and webfinger endpoints, where having it set up to cache posts and profiles for like 60 seconds (or however long the Cache-Control header says, Mastodon defaults to 180s) would alleviate the strain on the server so much.
There are other thing you can do, like this post explains some other things for Misskey, but the defaults should be sensible so you don't have to be a sysadmin expert to host an instance and they're currently not. I host 2 Lemmy instances (ukfli.uk and sappho.social) from a £5/month VPS and they're able to handle bursts of hundreds of requests without issue.
Bluesky is built to assume a handful of big relay (remember that a relay can merge in contents of another) and a bunch of appview and a ton of PDS servers, feed generators, moderation labelers, etc.
People are already building small, non-archival relays so this assumption seems mute. It's also important to remember that relays are an optimisation, not a core part of the protocol.
WHEN YOU SEE IT
Not sure which IT I'm supposed to see...
It's a double reference to osu player Cookiezi's two plays on Blue Zenith's [FOUR DIMENSIONS] difficulty using HR and HDHR respectively getting 727pp in both plays with a miss right around the end, and Aireu's reaction after getting a 727pp play
this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2025
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