Practical Decentralization

https://www.pfrazee.com/blog/practical-decentralization

by chokolad • 5 months ago

8 3 5 months ago

Kye• 5 months ago

Federation: focuses on diffusing responsibility

P2P: everyone is responsible for their part of it

Atproto: you should be able to choose how much responsibility you actually need or want while mitigating risk through competing stacks and credible exit

extraduder_ire• 5 months ago

Never heard the phrase "magical mesh" to describe certain types of p2p before.

Good name.

goldsteinq• 5 months ago

It keeps missing the fact that BlueSky, as of today, is not decentralized in any meaningful way. If tomorrow bsky.app (and/or PLC registry) goes dark, the network is dead. There’re no public alternative AppViews. Most users use centralized PLC IDs, which depend on the centralized infra. An extreme minority of users uses external PDSes.

https://blue.mackuba.eu/stats/

https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/

We need to finish moving PLC into an independent org

Does not make it decentralized; instead creates a second centralized failure point.

large scale “appviews” — the aggregating backends of apps — are still a bit too expensive and a bit too difficult to write

Which is an architectural limitation, because AppViews must store the entire network, and will only get worse.

It’s really weird to say that BlueSky is an example of “practical decentralization” when all of its decentralization serves no practical purpose at all.

Practical Decentralization

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