this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
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This isn't necessarily true. Just because their architecture is harder and not a simple server host does not strip away its decentralization.
They have decentralized the following:
App access (can build your own or show openProto posts in your platform
Algorithms
Relay (backend albeit rumored to be expensive)
More if you consider the domain name hosting stuff and media storage control. Also moderation is planned to be decentralized.
Not even rumored, so much as explicitly expected.
This doesn't seem to be that big an issue as PDS's can just directly communicate with one-another like how ActivityPub works.
They're supposed to be able to, true, but I've not come across any examples of that in action yet. If you know of any I'd be interested in seeing them, as I've been trying to keep up with AuthTransfer's developments.
Isn't that what Whitewind is doing?
Hmm, if so, it wasn't clear in the documentation I read. I was of the impression it was still passing posts through the relay to enable others' discovery & interaction.
I could be mistaken too, this has all only recently become interoperable so there's some growing pains
Isn't the only thing that really matters decentralised control?
Open protocols and APIs seem pretty meaningless to me if there's a single point of control for the brand.
If everyone migrates to bluesky and then bluesky says "of we're not doing that open thing anymore because of this new embiggened thing we're doing" everyone will still be on bluesky.
You'd need to expand on this more for me to understand you. Yes there's a single point of control from a moderation standpoint (labeler), as there is on Lemmy instances. But anyone can host their own ATProto relays and the Bluesky relay will federate with each other automatically.
Not necessarily because the accounts are atProto accounts and you can migrate to another platform(albeit another doesn't exist yet) without data loss. As far as the Bluesky app goes it really just shows you atProto posts and hosts your data (similar to Lemmy instances) they as an entity just also maintain the OSS backend Relay crawler and more.
I really think a lot of people have this perspective that it's not decentralized just because it truly is a lot more complicated due to there being like 5 different moving pieces of decentralization (PDS, Relay, Appview, tbd labeler, algorithm) and they do a great job at obscuring it for regular users which is a great thing. And nobody has really tinkered around and set-up any sites or integrations with it yet. I'm personally trying to get a two way mastodon integration as it's possible but nobody has done a solid implementation (just somewhat gnarly bridges between protocols)
Oh sure ok. Silly me. I can't wait to be embraced by the utopia of open standards bluesky is going to inspire.
Tl;Dr it isn't decentralized.
If you can build your own or selfhost each of the following to read and push back to all of the atProto protocol:
App
Backend Relay
Moderation
Algorithm
And you still say that's not decentralized I'm not sure what you're looking for nor what your definition of decentralization is.
If I log into BlueSky right now, can I see posts from other instances? This is a legitimate question since the twitter archetype doesn't appeal to me.
Yes! Actually.
The full atproto up and running with bluesky is only in the last month or so, so people are finally starting to trickle out and set up their own services and hosts.
It's actually very promising and hopeful.
TIL, thanks!
Instances aren't necessarily a thing in atProto because an instance usually refers to a single server. But you can see people's posts from selfhosted PDS/relays yes.
Then yeah, that sounds like federation to me.