Haven't we learned by now that approximately no one cares? Centralised services are vastly more popular than federated ones, the main reason being that they reduce the paradox / paralysis of choice when you're signing up for them. (Solve that problem properly and you may be on to something.)
Definitely agree that centralized services have a lot of advantages. Bluesky deserves some criticism for trying to have their cake and eat it too, though. They told a good story about being decentralized, and lots of people repeated it while ignoring technical experts pointing out it's not true. Even on HN, the claim that they're decentralized was repeated a lot.
No. This isn’t true. Bluesky has always been very transparent about exactly what flavor of decentralization they offer. The whole thing is swappable microservices you can host yourself, including the relay if you really care. The relay is an optimization to make their app offering work in a performant, scalable way.
The protocol Bluesky is built on is certainly decentralized. It’s really fucking annoying that people act like it’s not “real” decentralization, when in fact it’s just a different flavor of decentralization on the technical level compared to, say, the fediverse.
Exactly. There's a lot of dogmatic hype with atproto, which is kinda giving me early crypto/NFT vibes. Any discussions or criticisms are quickly snuffed out or labeled as toxic or uninformed, or devolve into whataboutism.
A lot of the content on bluesky, but especially in its early days, is about how the protocol is great, its potential and what bright future it will lead us into. Their main investors are a crypto bro company. Their CEO has built her career around crypto. It's the same rhetoric.
Now it's about decentralized "verification". They still haven't defined what they're verifying except a vague term "the person posting is who they say they are", but it's not actual identity verification.
The endgame is probably monetizing the protocol by connecting it to some form of identity for crypto-bs or paywalling engagement via the verification.
I'm pretty sure the ATproto answer to that is "don't bother users with that decision", i.e. just point new users to somewhere (be it bsky.social or some other PDS provider) and call it a day. This "works" from a decentralized/federated point of view because ATproto supports migrating accounts/identities between PDSes even if the old PDS is offline or adversarial, and because account/identity hosting (i.e. the PDS) is decoupled from the app itself (i.e. the appview) - so even if you signed up as @foo.example.app instead of @foo.bsky.social, you can still log into Bluesky as @foo.example.app (and likewise, @bar.bsky.social can still log into Example App), and if Example App (or Bluesky, for that matter) ever kicks the bucket you can migrate your account (and its followers, and very likely its public content, and possibly its private content if that was backed up somewhere) to someplace else.
I thought I had it (mostly) solved with fediverser: users would go to one place, sign up with OAuth to the service they wanted to leave (Reddit, Twitter...) and the system would behind the scenes create an account on any of the participating instances. In doing so, it could leverage the user existing information (subreddits subscribed, users followed on Twitter) and find the corresponding subreddits/users that are already registered.
Turns out the biggest challenge was not in getting users, but in convincing admins to join the network. Instances with open registrations are already dealing with spammer accounts, and none of them was excited about the idea of this extra vector for having unvetted users on their services.
This doesn't mean that centralized services are safe, though. I am reasonably convinced that we can have "social media" that is less focused on "platforms" and more like what we (used to) have with web: companies and institutions owning their presence by running ActivityPub "servers" on their own domain, and a hotch-potch of community/commercial servers to serve the users who want "basic access".
But to get there, we need to stop thinking that the way to get rid of Facebook/Twitter/Reddit/Instagram/YouTube is by taking their templates and tacking "but federated!", and we need to really come up with a killer app on ActivityPub (or Solid, or Linked Data, or ActivityPods) to disrupt the whole thing entirely.
> Turns out the biggest challenge was not in getting users, but in convincing admins to join the network
The incentives for homeserver admins are extremely perverted and it's why the Mastodon network in particular is so dominated by ideological cliques.
Running a homeserver is thankless, laborious, and expensive, and the costs go up with each user. There's no money for it, so admins have to be compensated another way. Either they get off on the power, or have an ideological axe to grind and thus moral compensation, or they are altruistic and eventually burn out when they are subjected to the abuse of the job.
The financial story has to be solved. Admins must be paid to run services or the services get distorted to compensate them some other way.
Yup. Mastodon has this issue. Can’t pick a big generic instance because it could get defederated for spam/being too normie; can’t pick a small instance because it could get defederated over some ridiculous drama [1][2].
Normal people (and even some not-normal people) don’t want to deal with that. “Instances” are a bad model.
I don't think the instances themselves are the problem. It's rather the whole defederation mess. If this had been left in the users' own hands rather than the server operators, it wouldn't have been an issue.
After all email is very federated and it works fine. And people have no issue grokking it. The implementation matters.
The main reason is that they have marketing of a corporate entity behind them and someone to sign a contract with.
I've seen many times - company switching from free, open-source, distributed solution to a worse, closed-source, coporate-backed solution just so they have someone to sign a contract with.
First time it was moving from self-hosted Jabber to MSN Messanger (is sucked, worked less reliably than self-hosted jabber, didn't worked on Linux, and was probably way more expansive in the long run). Then it was moving from self-hosted wikis to some B2B solution. Then it was self-hosted git to corporate github or sth similar.
I understand the theory behind outsourcing these things, especially if you're just starting. But if you already have the OS solution deployed and working - why switch?
The first startup I worked for had 1 IT guy among 12 people, and everything was in-house, including servers. The second grew to 50 people and did not ever employ an IT guy for internal work - most stuff was run on SaaS and the total cost was less than an IT guy salary. Any admin was done by taking engineering time, and no-one wanted to divert that away from product to do in-house stuff. Because when you're taking time away from product, it's not just the salary but the opportunity cost, because any investment in product is supposed to return a multiple.
Maybe, but I think a lot of people are more acutely aware of the risks of centralized services lately, and I think BlueSky likely got a popularity boost by pretending to be decentralized.
I wouldn't be so dismissive of the importance when people succumb to the realization that it's like VHS/Betamax, but instead of Bruce Willis in Die Hard, at stake is literally half of your friends and acquaintances.
Email has solved federation / decentralisation long before WWW.
Nobody is confused when you hand them a user@gmail.com, user@hotmail.com, etc; I use my own user@whatever.com and sometimes get a blank stare, until people realise you can go to www.gmail.com to check your own inbox, and you can totally just type www.whatever.com into your browser.
Links like reddit.com/u/user, youtube.com/@user, already exist and are de facto a standard of some kind. If we stop trying to make @user@whatever.com a thing, the only obstacle is in convincing people that whatever.com/user is just another link you can click, and this is totally how they can reach you - send you a message.
Federation between servers is an entirely different topic, but for the purpose of this discussion we can assume it's just an implementation detail - just like SMTP is for GMail users.
I'm probably making this sound more trivial than it actually is, but IMO all you have to do is build up on existing paradigms and collective understanding.
It's funny you mention gmail and hotmail. That's exactly my point. Who is setting up their own email server when they could instead sign up for one of those? Is it even 1 in 100,000 email users?
(I say this as someone running my own email server, who periodically has problems sending to gmail.)
The issue is that relays tend to require a lot more resources to operate than appviews and PDSes (though not necessarily as much as that blog post suggests; I recall posts of people running their own relays on RPi4s with NVMe drives), so it's common for alternative appviews to rely on Bluesky's relay instead of taking on the expense of spinning up a new one.
In any case, as that toot notes, the Bluesky outage was on a PDS level rather than a relay level. And thankfully it's much less expensive to run your own PDS; apparently those who do so weren't impacted.
Genuine question: if it's so easy and cheap to host a relay, why then "Free Our Feeds" initiative [0] looking to raise $4,000,000 [1] to establish a second relay [2]? Most of that money must be earmarked for administrative and human expenses then, right?
That wasn't asserted anywhere. Quite the opposite: as I explained above, the expense is why few people have done it (and even fewer have done it in production). It's the PDSes which are (relatively) cheap and easy to self-host.
> why then "Free Our Feeds" initiative [0] looking to raise $4,000,000 [1] to establish a second relay [2]?
Per the section you cite, they're doing a lot more with that money than running a second relay: they're spinning up an entirely separate organization independent of Bluesky to develop ATproto and applications using it. That includes, but is nowhere implied or explied to be limited to, the "second relay" they mention.
In any case, even the self-hosted relay described in that above-linked blog post (let alone some RPi under someone's bed) is in all likelihood a long ways off from one that's even remotely production-ready. There's no mention of redundancy, no mention of future-proofing, etc. It's reasonable to assume that the "second relay" would be multiple such relays, likely on machines with even beefier specs - in other words, at least as capable as the existing Bluesky-managed relay. I'd also be unsurprised if it expanded to a "third relay" and "fourth relay" and so on.
Further, there's more to running a relay than just the hardware; you need someone to maintain it. $4 million pays for 40 employee-years (assuming every employee is full-time with an annual salary of $100k). That could be one sysadmin for 40 years, or an 8 person team for 5 years, or a 40 person team for 1 year, or what have you. Free our feeds claims they'll need $30 million over 3 years, i.e. $10 million per year; if half that goes to salaries, we end up with a napkin-math-guesstimated team size of 50 - which is about the size I'd expect for an organization that wants to independently maintain a bunch of technical infrastructure, develop applications, prod whomever needs prodded to get ATproto formally standardized, etc.
Scale, its always question of scale. Whatever youncan easily and cheaply host yourself will likely be only good enough for you and your friends or family. Anything more will require more hardware and dedicated people for maintaining that hardware and software.
the relay at this point is non-archival and can be spun up trivially. with a small sliding history window for subscriber catchup u can use like 32gb of scratch disk space and keep a few hours, the relay is literally just a subscribeRepos forwarder from PDSes.
the AppView is vastly more expensive to run since you need to handle the write volume of all bsky activity. if you build a non-bsky app on atproto this is a non-issue
the issue here really is that nobody writes about the state of things in long form outside the network so it's not really known how fast things move and change by those not engaged with the platform
The genie is already out of the bottle for thirty years, and it's called the open web. Luckily I don't need half the world's population to agree upon and use something that already exists out there.
Keep posting on your website and keep linking. It's called the 'web' for a reason.
I absolutely love thew web. I wish I could get onboard with this sentiment. But, the web bitrots away, piece by piece year by year. Archive.org mercifully backstops against much of the loss. But its not enough.
And demanding everyone buy and own a domain name & figure out hosting seems unviable as requirements for the world's mass communication system.
The Bluesky PDS architecture is a lovely lovely modest & small iteration on the web, adds only a bit more. To make your vault of content still addressable, still a URL, but one tied to a cryptographic identifier. And to make the content all signed and secure.
You know why it's called the web? Because all the websites and webpages linking to each other form the shape of a web. I don't know what shape the internet is going to be, but the web is shaped like a web. Also tomorrow.
If you understand that Bluesky today is just Twitter for a different audience, then you realize nobody there cares about decentralization and all that mumbo jumbo.
Which is fine, I don’t care either, but this whole spiel that they are decentralized feels dishonest.
i don’t actively contribute to Bluesky nor Fedi (i do consume content from both), but it’s pretty frustrating to see BlueSky being argued into a centralized service for the recent downtime.
- The downtime was not relay level, but it was a PDS level. So the point is moot already.
- Because it was decentralized at the PDS level, the outage did not affect anyone with personal PDSes, which contains the data that you care about.
- Even if it was the relay level, relays aren’t centralized, anyone can spin up another relay (because everything on the relay is derived from PDS data). It’s just that it’s going to be pretty expensive and consume much resources. Which is a fair point, and might be argued that the network currently has a single big point of failure, but that doesn’t mean it’s centralized.
And then people now start arguing that the fact that BlueSky-hosted PDSes went down at the same time is now another proof that BlueSky is centralized?
That’s like arguing that Gmail can go down and all @gmail.com mail addresses won’t work, so email is centralized. Or AWS can have an outage and all AWS-powered websites will break down, so the web is centralized.
One can say that there’s a single big point of failure (which the BlueSky LLC is, just like AWS, Gmail, or the mastodon.social instance in the case of Fedi), but that doesn’t make the whole service centralized.
Yeah lots of the commenting online seems in somewhat bad faith about this.
I’ve listened to interviews with the Bluesky CEO and the Mastodon founder (CEO?), and it was quite eye opening. They have very different views on their roles. The Bluesky CEO is thinking at the level of community building, incentives, longevity, and decentralisation at a fundamental level, whereas the Mastodon founder seems primarily motivated by building an open source project and supporting contributions from the community.
Neither approach is wrong, but they’re different and are clearly achieving different things.
Mastodon might be easier to self host on the surface, being just another Rails site, but the result isn’t a “world without caesars”, it’s a world with a lot more caesars, where anyone can be one. Migrating instances is roughly impossible if you have any presences you want to preserve, and ActivityPub compliance is essentially defined by Mastodon’s current behaviour.
Bluesky on the other hand seems to so far be far more successful at the community building and laying out the protocol foundations, at the cost of being harder to self host. But honestly, having self hosted Mastodon and switched (and forced to start again in the process), so what? Hosting a PDS is trivial and that’s the bit that really matters anyway.
Mastodon should be recognised for how much it shifted the conversation around social networking, especially in the first year after Twitter’s acquisition, but it seems clear that Bluesky has some fundamental advancements that Mastodon fans seem unable to recognise simply because it looks so different.
Readit News
The relay is described here and here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.03239, https://atproto.com/guides/glossary#relay
The protocol Bluesky is built on is certainly decentralized. It’s really fucking annoying that people act like it’s not “real” decentralization, when in fact it’s just a different flavor of decentralization on the technical level compared to, say, the fediverse.
A lot of the content on bluesky, but especially in its early days, is about how the protocol is great, its potential and what bright future it will lead us into. Their main investors are a crypto bro company. Their CEO has built her career around crypto. It's the same rhetoric.
Now it's about decentralized "verification". They still haven't defined what they're verifying except a vague term "the person posting is who they say they are", but it's not actual identity verification.
The endgame is probably monetizing the protocol by connecting it to some form of identity for crypto-bs or paywalling engagement via the verification.
Turns out the biggest challenge was not in getting users, but in convincing admins to join the network. Instances with open registrations are already dealing with spammer accounts, and none of them was excited about the idea of this extra vector for having unvetted users on their services.
This doesn't mean that centralized services are safe, though. I am reasonably convinced that we can have "social media" that is less focused on "platforms" and more like what we (used to) have with web: companies and institutions owning their presence by running ActivityPub "servers" on their own domain, and a hotch-potch of community/commercial servers to serve the users who want "basic access".
But to get there, we need to stop thinking that the way to get rid of Facebook/Twitter/Reddit/Instagram/YouTube is by taking their templates and tacking "but federated!", and we need to really come up with a killer app on ActivityPub (or Solid, or Linked Data, or ActivityPods) to disrupt the whole thing entirely.
The incentives for homeserver admins are extremely perverted and it's why the Mastodon network in particular is so dominated by ideological cliques.
Running a homeserver is thankless, laborious, and expensive, and the costs go up with each user. There's no money for it, so admins have to be compensated another way. Either they get off on the power, or have an ideological axe to grind and thus moral compensation, or they are altruistic and eventually burn out when they are subjected to the abuse of the job.
The financial story has to be solved. Admins must be paid to run services or the services get distorted to compensate them some other way.
Normal people (and even some not-normal people) don’t want to deal with that. “Instances” are a bad model.
[1]: https://tootworld.social/@lilythelonelygirl/1143999833553083...
[2]: https://tau-ceti.space/@lo__@mastodon.social/114394202556951...
Your comment also implies their actions affect all other instances just by seldomly doing this action. Which isn't the case.
We can cherry pick all day, but one cannot take the whole Fediverse down like it happened with Bluesky. Which is the topic at hand.
Nobody is going to defederate from mastodon.social, but otherwise, this is all true.
After all email is very federated and it works fine. And people have no issue grokking it. The implementation matters.
Dead Comment
I've seen many times - company switching from free, open-source, distributed solution to a worse, closed-source, coporate-backed solution just so they have someone to sign a contract with.
First time it was moving from self-hosted Jabber to MSN Messanger (is sucked, worked less reliably than self-hosted jabber, didn't worked on Linux, and was probably way more expansive in the long run). Then it was moving from self-hosted wikis to some B2B solution. Then it was self-hosted git to corporate github or sth similar.
I understand the theory behind outsourcing these things, especially if you're just starting. But if you already have the OS solution deployed and working - why switch?
Nobody is confused when you hand them a user@gmail.com, user@hotmail.com, etc; I use my own user@whatever.com and sometimes get a blank stare, until people realise you can go to www.gmail.com to check your own inbox, and you can totally just type www.whatever.com into your browser.
Links like reddit.com/u/user, youtube.com/@user, already exist and are de facto a standard of some kind. If we stop trying to make @user@whatever.com a thing, the only obstacle is in convincing people that whatever.com/user is just another link you can click, and this is totally how they can reach you - send you a message.
Federation between servers is an entirely different topic, but for the purpose of this discussion we can assume it's just an implementation detail - just like SMTP is for GMail users.
I'm probably making this sound more trivial than it actually is, but IMO all you have to do is build up on existing paradigms and collective understanding.
(I say this as someone running my own email server, who periodically has problems sending to gmail.)
Deleted Comment
But yeah, the majority of people won't ever understand that. And, in all honesty, that's fine.
Really, I'm cool with just having people around who care enough to grasp that. If you care that's cool, if not ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Nevertheless, this discussion is a whole other topic. They are just pointing out a potential issue.
The issue is that relays tend to require a lot more resources to operate than appviews and PDSes (though not necessarily as much as that blog post suggests; I recall posts of people running their own relays on RPi4s with NVMe drives), so it's common for alternative appviews to rely on Bluesky's relay instead of taking on the expense of spinning up a new one.
In any case, as that toot notes, the Bluesky outage was on a PDS level rather than a relay level. And thankfully it's much less expensive to run your own PDS; apparently those who do so weren't impacted.
[0] https://freeourfeeds.com/
[1] https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-us-free-social-media-from-bi...
[2] https://freeourfeeds.com/ § FAQ § What will the money be used for?
That wasn't asserted anywhere. Quite the opposite: as I explained above, the expense is why few people have done it (and even fewer have done it in production). It's the PDSes which are (relatively) cheap and easy to self-host.
> why then "Free Our Feeds" initiative [0] looking to raise $4,000,000 [1] to establish a second relay [2]?
Per the section you cite, they're doing a lot more with that money than running a second relay: they're spinning up an entirely separate organization independent of Bluesky to develop ATproto and applications using it. That includes, but is nowhere implied or explied to be limited to, the "second relay" they mention.
In any case, even the self-hosted relay described in that above-linked blog post (let alone some RPi under someone's bed) is in all likelihood a long ways off from one that's even remotely production-ready. There's no mention of redundancy, no mention of future-proofing, etc. It's reasonable to assume that the "second relay" would be multiple such relays, likely on machines with even beefier specs - in other words, at least as capable as the existing Bluesky-managed relay. I'd also be unsurprised if it expanded to a "third relay" and "fourth relay" and so on.
Further, there's more to running a relay than just the hardware; you need someone to maintain it. $4 million pays for 40 employee-years (assuming every employee is full-time with an annual salary of $100k). That could be one sysadmin for 40 years, or an 8 person team for 5 years, or a 40 person team for 1 year, or what have you. Free our feeds claims they'll need $30 million over 3 years, i.e. $10 million per year; if half that goes to salaries, we end up with a napkin-math-guesstimated team size of 50 - which is about the size I'd expect for an organization that wants to independently maintain a bunch of technical infrastructure, develop applications, prod whomever needs prodded to get ATproto formally standardized, etc.
the relay at this point is non-archival and can be spun up trivially. with a small sliding history window for subscriber catchup u can use like 32gb of scratch disk space and keep a few hours, the relay is literally just a subscribeRepos forwarder from PDSes.
the AppView is vastly more expensive to run since you need to handle the write volume of all bsky activity. if you build a non-bsky app on atproto this is a non-issue
the issue here really is that nobody writes about the state of things in long form outside the network so it's not really known how fast things move and change by those not engaged with the platform
Keep posting on your website and keep linking. It's called the 'web' for a reason.
And demanding everyone buy and own a domain name & figure out hosting seems unviable as requirements for the world's mass communication system.
The Bluesky PDS architecture is a lovely lovely modest & small iteration on the web, adds only a bit more. To make your vault of content still addressable, still a URL, but one tied to a cryptographic identifier. And to make the content all signed and secure.
Yes, historic ones. It's not a prediction about the future shape of the internet.
Wait, how did a decentralized service like Bluesky go down? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43789178 - April 2025 (2 comments)
Which is fine, I don’t care either, but this whole spiel that they are decentralized feels dishonest.
- The downtime was not relay level, but it was a PDS level. So the point is moot already.
- Because it was decentralized at the PDS level, the outage did not affect anyone with personal PDSes, which contains the data that you care about.
- Even if it was the relay level, relays aren’t centralized, anyone can spin up another relay (because everything on the relay is derived from PDS data). It’s just that it’s going to be pretty expensive and consume much resources. Which is a fair point, and might be argued that the network currently has a single big point of failure, but that doesn’t mean it’s centralized.
And then people now start arguing that the fact that BlueSky-hosted PDSes went down at the same time is now another proof that BlueSky is centralized?
That’s like arguing that Gmail can go down and all @gmail.com mail addresses won’t work, so email is centralized. Or AWS can have an outage and all AWS-powered websites will break down, so the web is centralized.
One can say that there’s a single big point of failure (which the BlueSky LLC is, just like AWS, Gmail, or the mastodon.social instance in the case of Fedi), but that doesn’t make the whole service centralized.
I’ve listened to interviews with the Bluesky CEO and the Mastodon founder (CEO?), and it was quite eye opening. They have very different views on their roles. The Bluesky CEO is thinking at the level of community building, incentives, longevity, and decentralisation at a fundamental level, whereas the Mastodon founder seems primarily motivated by building an open source project and supporting contributions from the community.
Neither approach is wrong, but they’re different and are clearly achieving different things.
Mastodon might be easier to self host on the surface, being just another Rails site, but the result isn’t a “world without caesars”, it’s a world with a lot more caesars, where anyone can be one. Migrating instances is roughly impossible if you have any presences you want to preserve, and ActivityPub compliance is essentially defined by Mastodon’s current behaviour.
Bluesky on the other hand seems to so far be far more successful at the community building and laying out the protocol foundations, at the cost of being harder to self host. But honestly, having self hosted Mastodon and switched (and forced to start again in the process), so what? Hosting a PDS is trivial and that’s the bit that really matters anyway.
Mastodon should be recognised for how much it shifted the conversation around social networking, especially in the first year after Twitter’s acquisition, but it seems clear that Bluesky has some fundamental advancements that Mastodon fans seem unable to recognise simply because it looks so different.