How decentralized is Bluesky really?

https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

by todsacerdoti • 2 years ago

87 16 2 years ago

Kye• 2 years ago

There's an in-progress thread version with discussion: https://social.coop/@cwebber/113527462572885698

Both are worth reading. So much analysis starts with either doubting the intentions of the Bluesky people or from some level of misinformation or misunderstanding, and it's hard to even begin addressing that.

Informed critique is vital to keeping things on track. This sets the standard.

S0y• 2 years ago

This is also written by one of the person who helped create ActivityPub and worked along Jay Grabber to create one of the first proposals at twitter for the thing that eventually became the ATProto.

pfraze• 2 years ago

Jay collaborated on multiple distinct proposals prior to Bluesky PBC, back when it was a community effort. I wouldn't suggest a lineage from that proposal and atproto.

steveklabnik4• 2 years ago

This is one of the better criticisms of bsky/atproto I’ve read. So glad to read a good one. Just two comments:

DMs were added out of protocol for exactly the reason the author suspects: users were clamoring for this functionality, and doing it right will take a while. So they’ve alluded to plans to bring them back into the protocol, but for now, most people are okay with trusting Bluesky and being able to do what they want to do. It’s effectively a non-regression from the point of “I’m migrating from Twitter.”

it seems unlikely that downplaying the role of domains is something Bluesky as an organization will be motivated to do since selling domains is currently a Bluesky business strategy.

It seems like this integration has disappeared, as far as I can tell. They didn’t say anything about it publicly that I saw.

mrlongroots• 2 years ago

To offer a different perspective, I think this is lazy criticism. There is a fundamental tradeoff between the "sharding strategy" of a social network and user experience. Both bluesky and mastodon are reasonably pareto-optimal given this tradeoff.

Mastodon goes for real "decentralization" with tiny shards of the "content tier", which means:

1. There is a lot of intra-shard bandwidth but relatively limited inter-shard bandwidth. You can create a truly seamless global experience, with global search, recommendations etc.

2. There is no uniformity in user experience (say moderation-wise) as each shard is essentially a personal fiefdom.

Bluesky instead decouples the storage layer from the caching + serving layer. This allows data portability but still allows a truly unified view of the social network.

Users are free to choose between the two approaches and most overwhelmingly choose Bluesky. But it is not very thoughtful to criticize a pareto-optimal design point for compromising one property to gain another.

steveklabnik4• 2 years ago

"I think this criticism is good" does not mean I agree with it; it's just that I have read so many criticisms that are poorly formed, come from a place of ignorance, stuff like that. This one is at least informed, doesn't make any obviously factually incorrect statements, seems to be trying to provide more heat than light, etc.

tmiku2• 2 years ago

Bluesky uses content-addressed content, so that content can survive if a node goes down

Does anyone have recommended reading about how Bluesky implements this? I've skimmed the docs at atproto.com but I'm not sure how this fits in there. It's also not clear to me how content-addressed content protects against node failures in general.

steveklabnik4• 2 years ago

Through stuff like https://ipld.io/specs/transport/car/carv1/

It's also not clear to me how content-addressed content protects against node failures in general.

Imagine my PDS host disappears. Server's gone.

I can spin up a new PDS of my own, or sign up for one that exists, and then replay all of my posts from the relay, and put them into the new PDS. I'm now back up and running without any involvement from the old PDS host.

tmiku2• 2 years ago

Does the relay durably store data from the PDSes it crawls? I thought it just aggregates and distributes data from the PDSes it is actively connected to.

Edit: I now see via https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/backfill that this is the case. I'm surprised that the docs don't mention it more clearly that relays store the full contents of the attached PDSes, but maybe I'm just not up to speed on learning how this works.

mdaniel• 2 years ago

To save one the trouble of chasing one of the dead links from their co-submission snippet <https://gitlab.com/-/snippets/2535398>: https://web.archive.org/web/20221206075054/https://agoric.co...

IlPeach• 2 years ago

I only wish this website would be adapting to the viewport width. It's good awful to look at on mobile

mediumsmart• 2 years ago

I was just about to close it but readermode worked Safari iOS

camgunz• 2 years ago

There have only ever been 3 models: NNTP, email, and IRC. ActivityPub is email, that is different servers have different data. Bluesky is NNTP, that is different servers have the same data.

I think a lot of this work is cool, in particular I love the stuff cribbed from IPFS. But I think the main idea here ("we got into trouble because we took responsibility for moderation, let's at least make it possible for it to be someone else's responsibility so we can say 'hey, you might not like our moderation and that's fair; just run your own!'") doesn't address the core problems Twitter had. This structure of media heavily incentivizes shallow communication and rage bait. It divides us by reducing us to cardboard cutouts of our hottest takes and worst moments. It isn't a good idea. Making it impervious to Congressional scorn isn't a step in the right direction.

But OK, stipulating I'm wrong here, it seems fully bonkers that in order to "decentralize" a platform like Twitter that each node has to have a full archive of everything. Who realistically would do this? Wouldn't it be easier to offer your own moderation algorithm or client instead? Is it supposed to protect against Elon Musk buying it too? Feels like being open source and running some replicas is easier (again, the NNTP model).

donio• 2 years ago

Bluesky is NNTP, that is different servers have the same data.

Yes but with only one real server which has 99%+ of the users and the rest on single user Leafnode instances.

sourcepluck• 2 years ago

I hadn't seen this here, but had been browsing CLM's blog yesterday unrelatedly, saw this, went for a browse, and read every word. It's very good!

How decentralized is Bluesky really?

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