this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2025
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https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
I support what they wanna do with a credible exit, but claiming that their goal is to or that they do make it easy for multiple different social networks (your PDS is not a new network, it’s data locally stored for the existing network) to communicate with each other is just false
Yep. You can even go right into the source code and find out if it is truly decentralized. And right now, ActivityHub is and ATProto is not. Maybe at some point it will be (which I hope will happen regardless of bluesky) but at the moment, it is not.
Both have some P2P components but one of the big ones from ATProto:
"The answer, if you guessed it, is centralization. All direct messages, no matter what your Personal Data Store is, no matter what your relay is, go through Bluesky, the company." which you can see more clearly starting here: https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/blob/01f2bd13eb62a0aef43bfdad7594dd69f58bc9f5/packages/pds/src/pipethrough.ts#L94
I tried to get one of the ATProto relays up and running but I didnt have nearly enough hard drive space to get all the data. Whereas I host quite a few federated services that include ActivityHub on a tiny server.
I'm fully aware that might not be #1 goal at the end of the day, but we're starting to see multiple social media networks start to exist with their own infrastructure on ATProto (https://sprk.so/ is in beta) and more importantly hosted outside the US.
These separate networks can interact with the BlueSky network if they choose so and the BlueSky network can interact with theirs if they use their Lexicon. There are other lightweight apps being built on top of BlueSkys Lexicon and relay system as well that are whole separate apps.
To say that's not their goal is a little weird because it's possible right now? Sure it might be difficult but they've merged quite a few changes to make the relay system much more accessible, and have put a lot of effort into the identity system recently.
That's a different type of social network, which is also good, but the point is you are heavily incentivized to make another microblog relay.
Not sure of the point here? If your end goal is decentralization yes run another relay similar to how you'd host a Mastodon instance.
Even if you create a whole new network with a whole new Lexicon, BlueSkys firehouse intakes all Lexicons
The idea of federation is that you have multiple instances of the same medium of social network; of the same lexicon. The same ATProto relay/firehose is the same instance of a social network. As explored in the link I gave you, ATProto does not make mastodon-scale self-hosting of relays easy, nor does it intend to, emphasis on "mastodon-scale"; instead, it makes centralized monolith self-hosting of existing/exported exoduses easy.