Bluesky, decentralisation, and the distribution of power Bluesky has seen a large inflow of new users following the results of the US election, and a significant amount of media attention as well. All that attention to Bluesky has also led to a renewed conversation around the question of whether Bluesky is decentralised or not. The terms decentralisation and federation are used in multiple ways: to describe the technological architecture details of an internet protocol, but just as often as a sh...
  • Funkwonker@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    2·
    1 month ago

    I don’t really get all the pessimism. Even if folks are right in saying there’ll be a bait and switch, this is people moving to a new platform en masse. If Bluesky goes to shit there’s more reason to believe users would just move again.

    In the meantime, as members of the fediverse, we should be using Bluesky being “decentralized” as a way to ease people into actually decentralized platforms.

    • Jared White@lemmy.worldEnglish
      11·
      1 month ago

      I can tell you right now nobody’s on Bluesky because it’s “decentralized” because the evidence is clear, it’s not in practice decentralized lol.

      This is all a bloody waste of time. I really wish I could just fast-forward two years into the enshittification when everyone realizes they got duped by Big VC. Again.

  • seaQueue@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 month ago

    I wonder which billionaire is going to snap up bluesky once they’ve fattened their crop of highly engaged users

  • iso@lemy.lolEnglish
    1·
    1 month ago

    Ok. I want to host my own Bluesky and interact with the bsky.app instance. How?

    The article is all about excuses.

    • schizo@forum.uncomfortable.businessEnglish
      1·
      1 month ago

      Install it and use it?

      Their PDS is self hosted, but it does still rely on the central relays (though you COULD host that yourself if you wanted to pay for it, I suppose?).

      It’s very centralized, but it’s not that different from what you’d have to do to make Mastodon useful: a small/single user instance will get zero content, even if you follow a lot of people, without also adding several relays to work around some of the design decisions made by the Mastodon team regarding replies and how federation works for those kind of things, as well as to populate hashtags and searches and such.

      Though really you shouldn’t do any of that, and just use a good platform for discussion, like a forum or a threadiverse platform. (No seriously, absolutely hate “microblog” shit because it’s designed to just be zingers and hot takes and not actual meaningful conversations.)

  • blue_berry@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 month ago

    Decentralisation doesn’t necessarily come with decentralized technical infrastructure, but its the basis for it. I’m still betting on ActivityPub. Sure social insentives are important, but the most openess will win. Also, Wordpress, Flipboard, Threads already joined ActivityPub, so the ecosystem already is kind of attractive in that direction.