So, if you’re online poisoned like me, you may have noticed that Bluesky CEO Jay Graber has been having sort of a slow motion, low-key public meltdown for the past several weeks. Most recently, in this interaction with a user.
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Even with practical technical decentralization, the vast majority of Bluesky users are on, well, Bluesky. Bluesky was never really packaged as something that was relatively easy for someone to spin up on their own servers; the network has been historically extremely centralized, and only small minorities of users have broken off.AT Proto decentralization doesn’t exist as a practical reality, and if it ever does it won’t be for years. Most of the work driving effective decentralization is being done by third parties, who have limited guarantees about future compatibility with possible breaking changes on Bluesky’s end.
Bluesky inc isn’t really making ‘a protocol’, they’re making Bluesky, the monolithic (to within a rounding error) social network that they operate.
I do genuinely believe that the Bluesky team set off from the start to create a decentralized protocol, but unfortunately for them they ended up running a social network. And at this point, AT Proto has become essentially a sort of ideological vaporware; a way for Jay Graber et al to run a social media platform while claiming they don’t run a social media platform.
This is, of course, just another iteration of the Silicon Valley monoproduct: power without accountability. The tech industry elite are very much like Gilded Age railroad barons – buying up whole towns, breaking up strikes, imposing top-down economic policy on whole sectors – except all the while they claim that they are just technology enthusiasts playing with their little trains.
That needs a longer explanation.
An instance does not interact with all other instances. It only syncs with other instances when users follow someone there, join a community, …
But that’s also a problem. It means you can’t search the entire Fediverse from a particular instance and find new and interesting discussions and people. There is no discovery feed. For that, you need something like Bluesky’s relay. That relay actually does keep up with what everyone is posting and archives it.
But that’s one aspect of Bluesky that draws a lot of criticism by Fedi people. A full relay is expensive to run and not something anyone can self-host. Pruned down versions are doable, though. If everyone actually did run their own relay, then one would get you the combinatorial problem.
In practice, large instances are the Fediverse solution to the discovery problem. You can see what the many users on that instance post. Also, the many users subscribe to many things and so a large instance will cache much content from elsewhere. That architecture encourages centralization.
There’s other difficult issues. So you have a little server that serves your content to a few followers. Some celebrity with millions of followers would have to rent an entire server rack. But what if little old you interacts with a celeb and now all their followers try to fetch your content from your little server? Common problem. You just need caching. EG the celebrity rack also serves your content to their followers and takes the load off your server. But now whoever is doing the caching can also filter replies. There’s no simply solution there.