bluesky's "decentralization" boils down to "you can upload things to the service"

it's obfuscated behind words like "personal data server" but there's nothing you can do with bluesky's "protocol" that you can't do an equivalent of by, say, uploading a video to youtube. you're not hosting "your own youtube", and you're not hosting "your own bluesky"

@ben
You can host each of the components of bluesky yourself (data storage, post aggregation, content filtering/moderation, and the app), it's just that basically nobody does any of that

And it allows you to have an effective disconnect of the main bluesky servers but practically you do not want that

@ben
The pds is where the data is stored. You can also host the relay server yourself

@ben
Like the entire discussion surrounding bluesky decentralization boils down to "it doesn't work exactly like the fediverse which is the only decentralized design apparently" while the real argument to make is "everyone uses the bluesky equivalent of mastodon.social"

@ben
Which can also access the same pdses as regular bluesky and vice versa

@ben @charlotte i have hosted my own relay and followed all the same people i normally follow on bsky
you can just subscribe to updates from PDSes
whether or not bluesky is decentralized right now given the bsky.social user concentration is up for debate, but the architecture inherently enables decentralization and migration

@charlotte @ben i ran the real argument is “bsky is designed to make spinning up an instance for anything but the most trivial part of the system prohibitively expensive”

@ben
If being able to be completely separate from the main bluesky servers (with your own apps, appview, relay, moderation, and pdses) is the same as just a twitter client, then we are also just using our own custom twitter clients

@ben
Like I'd point at blacksky here which has replicated the entire stack for their Userbase. You can also reach their users from bluesky and vice versa

@charlotte ???

@ben
Idk if there is a proper website but https://github.com/blacksky-algorithms

@dangerdyke @charlotte @ben but like . not rlly tho ? one can spin up a full atp stack , bsky interoperable , without that much exoense , the implementation just needs to do some clever things like : only storing data from places u actually care about n follow (=> breaking some threads just like with AP)

see how wafrn does it for example

i agree that bsky is corpo shitware but tge fact that their implementation of atp is shit doesnt make atp “badly designed” , in fact it is very versatile , even tho i also prefer a simpler protocol like ap since it makes things more straightforward

@dangerdyke
@ben that is a different point from "basically the same thing as just a twitter client let's ignore that twitter clients do not host your account profile"

@fiore @charlotte @ben our understanding could be flawed but we were under the impression that if you wanted the full stack you had to process every post on the network. I’m aware of blacksky and the like but aiui they still aren’t self hosting every part of the stack yet

@dangerdyke @ben @fiore if you wanted a bluesky 2 then doing that would be necessary would be my guess

but you don’t have to have a global view of everything to have a social networking service. you could for example limit the scope of your relay to just posts by your users and people they follow

@dangerdyke @charlotte @ben because they are using the same kind of implementation bsky uses . check out wafrn tho , it hosts everything thats necessary as far as im aware (migjt miss out on some specific things but thats probably because they havent gotten to implement tjose yet )

the idea of being able to host one s own identity seoarate from the specific relay infra one js using for example is very interesting !! and thats just not a thing ap can do

@charlotte @dangerdyke @ben exactly

@dangerdyke @charlotte @ben i also thought that atp was inherently flawed for this reason but its not rlly good to judge a technology when the only implementor is by a corpo fascist entity , is it

@fiore @dangerdyke @ben there are loads of problems don’t get me wrong and if it wasn’t started by jack dorsey bluesky would probably have a significantly better albeit likely not decentralized protocol

@fiore @ben @dangerdyke lots of tradeoffs that are unexplained and undefensible if you are doing a centralized social media network like bluesky effectively is. lots of lessions not learnt from the fediverse which predates it and does certain things better to begin with

@charlotte @ben @fiore @dangerdyke if it wasn't done by jack dorsey it would've been part of the fediverse lmfao

he straight-up asked "are there any pre-existing protocols for this" and everyone was screaming "activitypub exists", and he said "nah that shit sucks" and ended up making a worse protocol instead

@charlotte @dangerdyke @ben what r u talking abt specifically ?

one wildly different thing abt atp i kinda vibe with is that the moderation happens on a third separate layer from pds s and relays . the appview is a very interesting concept to me

@ben @dangerdyke @charlotte you are trickrd into thinking the bsky relay is a single point of failure becayse bsky is the only meaningful relay around rn . that doesnt have to be the case tho and alternatives are slowly starting to pop up , and thats a good thing

@ben @dangerdyke @charlotte what about the pds system itself . thats also a big feature

as i said , i would rather keep on an ap network becayse the simplicity makes it more fun for me . but i understand why someone would like the specific features atp provides

@ben @fiore @dangerdyke i can understand a clean break from the fediverse and it could have been better but they did not in fact make it better

i suppose relays is what you end up with if you want a global view like centralized social media networks with multiple nodes in the system. in a way centralized social media networks have something similar to said “relay” internally

@fiore @dangerdyke @ben atproto is designed around the cryptobro idea that everything should be public, unlike fedi which had some access control pretty early on. and authorized fetch to enforce blocks and the like. this makes it impossible to restrict visibility of posts beyond stupid client side restrictions like loginwalls

this also means that blocks are shared. also not learned from activitypub where it federating out blocks to remote instances is a harassment vector. and we don’t even get people’s whole blocklists here!

certain minor things are also limited. for example on twitter and on here it is possible to make someone unfollow you by “soft blocking”, i.e. blocking then unblocking. however blocked users stay following you on bluesky because you don’t have the authority to change their profile.

however bluesky does have better effective reply management than fedi, outside certain implementations like gotosocial

and posts and user identities being intrinsically linked with a practically ephemeral server identity on fedi is kind of annoying

@charlotte @dangerdyke @ben interesting !! yrag i would say those are big shortcomings