I didn't even realize that decentralization was a selling point for Bluesky. I genuinely thought it was just Twitter but not run by Elon Musk
this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2025
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Centralization on its own is not a deal breaker. Wikipedia is centralized.
Corporate/business ownership on it's own is not a deal breaker. There are many business mastodon instances: https://mastodonservers.net/servers/business
It's the combination that is a deal breaker. Corporate AND centralized. We've seen this movie before. It's a predictably boring story that ends with enshittification.
well bluesky is not owned by a normal corporation, but i’d say the problem is it’s supposed to be decentralized, that’s it’s entire point and purpose….
so if it’s not, then that’s problematic….
it’s still fairly new so maybe they want everything perfect before they start federating?
the split between Ruby version 1.8 and 1.9 was huge and seriously hindered it’s growth….
i have hope for Bluesky and the AT protocol… but not a ton of hope.
Agreeish? (M)any one of us can download wikipedia. Does that still make it centralized when it is designed to be distributed that easily? That design choice is baked into the ethos. Centralized vs. Decentralized seems not to be binary.
But once you download It, any changes you make are only local. You cannot edit wikipedia using a non-wikipedia account (sure you can edit anonymously but then your IP functions as your account) and the articles are not systematically stored in different wikipedia instances. There is one Wikipedia.
By the way, centralized doesn't mean "walled off".
Once you download wikipedia, you can edit it and distribute. Other people with their own copies can merge your changes into theirs, or you can push your changes upstream. Even if they need to be signed to accepted. Doesn't that make Wikipedia more like the Linux Kernel and less like The Encyclopedia Britannica? Sure, for the kernel there is a "main and central" repo, but the whole point of git is that it isn't centralized. It's distributed.
In fact, in a loose way, wikipedia meets the criteria of Free Software. You can:
- Read the source code
- Modify the source code
- Distribute the source code
- Distribute your modifications to the source code
edit: wikipedia is predominately licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA) and the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL)
Sure but I don't think that makes it "decentralized" it makes it as you correctly point out, open source. Those are orthogonal categories.There aren't parts of wikipedia that are hosted in other wikipedia instances that talk to each other the same way mastodon does. There is a unique, central, Wikipedia.
You can download all of bluesky easily through the firehose, and it is federated.
Luckily, there's non-corporate bluesky servers that I can use instead of the main one.
I agree with your overall point, but Wikipedia has a singular mission. Social settings can have wildy different missions from shitposting, to hobbies, study groups, to support groups, etc. There is no singular moderation ethos that can apply to all of them, that's why decentralization is important in social media.
We want to algorithms to work for the people, not have people slaving for the algorithms.
Of course I agree that decentralization for social media is hugely important. I'm just pointing out that there can exist use cases where centralization makes sense and/or is not a problem.
Absolutely I was not trying to take away from your point! Cory Doctorow actually recently wrote a good piece on Wikipedia that you reminded me of.
No.
The distinction is important, and every useful idiot pivoting from one corporate platform to another should be educated on their mistake.
I will continue to point it out as long as people keep recommending it. Its not a minor complaint or a small point of disagreement, its a complete deal breaker that makes the platform worthless to invest any time in. No matter how much time passes it will always be a shit platform as long as its centralized.
Also bluesky isnt part of the fediverse so this doesnt even really belong in here...
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Who cares. It's inherently a shit platform like Twitter. No one cares about your pithy half sentences.
There is no argument. It's centralised.
Is anyone arguing at this point?
It's not decentralized. There's no argument.
It is decentralised.
Check: blacksky.community, atproto.africa, altq.net, app.wafrn.net and zeppelin.social.
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If you don't want to hear any criticism, stop bringing up pseudo-decentralized corpo VC-backed Twitter 2.0
:3
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More importantly it's for-profit capitalist crap? With ethical and moral considerations, there is no reason to push this when there are alternatives with much better starting blocks.
Capitalism is not bad
It's a benefit corporation which means the board has to consider the benefit to society, employees, etc.
Author: points out how Bluesky is not decentralized.
Also Author: only points out how people are arguing about how Bluesky is decentralized.
Author: Mission Accomplished.
bluesky is technically decentralized, but the way it does it makes self-hosting all but impossible due to storage requirements. because of that, it really isnt. its like how a lot of ai models are 'open-source' even though the training data isnt available and the ai is still effectively a black box. it isnt decentralized unless anyone can make an instance, just like how it isnt open-source unless you have access to everything that makes it work (yes, by this definition chromium and android aren't truly open-source, and I stand by that).
The storage requirements aren't an issue anymore.
You can self host everything for around ~$34 a month.
@gabboman@app.wafrn.net runs an alternate bluesky instance (kinda) and he's not bankrupt yet. Hell, it was on a free oracle server for a while.
I haven't seen much arguing, it is unquestionably centralized and for profit. There truly is nothing unique about it.
I'm not an expert with the AT protocol but it really seems like what Dorsey and co have made is a super complicated protocol that (under specific conditions that cannot exist in the real world), has the potential to be federated in a meaningful way. That way they can steal all the talking points of the fediverse and muddy the meaning of words.
There are also a lot of people on Fedi who will seek out threads like these to explain how line 2532 of the AT protocol handbook explains how having 100% of users on a single server is actually decentralized but I'm sure they're all authentic accounts.
Hey, the at protocol is pretty simple really.
Essentially, the network has three main parts:
- PDSes: These are "dumb" data stores. The do not do anything except store data and handle authentication. Your account "lives" on them, but you can migrate between them seamlessly, and keep your data when you migrate.
- Relays: These connect to PDSes over websocket and store all the data from them. They provide a "firehose" of data through websockets. The advantage of relays is that there is far less missing information than on the fediverse.
- AppViews: These connect to relays and take the posts. They sort through the data and only keep what is relevant for them.
For example, bsky.app is an appview. It connects to the bolson.bsky.dev relay, and only takes objects that have anapp.bsky.*nsid/type. frontpage.fyi is another one, it connects to the relay1.us-west.bsky.network relay, it ignores all posts that except for ones withfyi.frontpage.*nsids, and that are too long.
This approach is way better than activitypub.
Relays aren't necessary, nor expensive to run (anymore). For example, appviewlite can be run easily, and can be configured to crawl PDSes itself, rather than using a relay.
The cost in running relays has also dropped. It's roughly $34 a month. Read this article by a bluesky dev: https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3kwzl7tye6u2y.
It has the potential to be federated in a meaningful way in the real world right now.
I'm not going to deny that most people using bluesky's servers is a problem, because it is.
Jack Dorsey wasn't very involved in bluesky, and isn't involved at all anymore. He left the board and deleted his account after they did moderation.
Bluesky, right now, is federated in a meaningful way. Whether or not it's decentralised only depends on your definition of the word at this point.
Also: the people who work at bluesky, right now, have very good intentions. I don't really think any are crypto-bros. The main problem is investors trying to claw back some value after they invested in it.
Yes, as soon as 99%+ of the users aren't on the same server. That's the bottom line. We can argue theory all day but it doesn't change the implications of centralization.
Over the last few weeks hundreds of people have moved their accounts to the new blacksky.app PDS, and they're running an early version of their app at blacksky.community
I've spent...quite a bit of time intentionally looking for alternative ATP servers and this is the first time I've heard of this. And I'm balls deep in this stuff. I even run my own AP server. So I'd say it's so obscure as to be meaningless.
99.99% of the users are still on infrastructure run by Bluesky PBC...but looking at all the progress and activity, it sure seems to me that's in the process of changing.
My guy. LOL. No. Just no. It isn't.
so many people in the Fediverse present the fact that 99.99% of Bluesky users are still using infrastructrure run by Bluesky PBC as if it's a gotcha
I mean...yeah? It is.
They just prefer to invest their time and energy in working to improve the situation
And we prefer to invest our time and energy into supporting an actually decentralized protocol.
rather than arguing about the semantics of "decentralization."
At what point was anyone arguing semantics?
So can we please stop arguing about this already?
Yes, please, go ahead.
Alternate ATP servers:
- altq.net: PDS
- app.wafrn.net: pds and appview
- atproto.africa: alt relay
- zeppelin.social: alt appview
- blacksky.app: alternate PDS
- blacksky.community: alternate appview
- witchcraft.systems: alt pds
- sprk.so: alt pds, plans on hosting an appview
- ~~gander.social~~ https://gandersocial.ca/ : canadian PDS, appview in plans
- arankwende.com: open-signup PDS
- atproto.hotwaru.com: open-signup PDS
- bsky.aenead.net: open-signup PDS
- casjay.social: open-signup PDs
- deer.social: alt-client
Honourable mention to AppViewLite which lets you easily and cheaply host an appview yourself. I can run it on my laptop easily. It doesn't depend on relays, it can crawls PDSes directly.
Plus the many other instances here: https://github.com/mary-ext/atproto-scraping
Thanks!
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can anyone recommend a good read into the actual developments happening with ATproto as of late? i've seen a lot of insisting lately that things are changing/have changed but no one's saying what exactly is or has changed
Fediverse Reports regularly talks about updates with ATProto, and I found this blog post mentioned in another blog post from WeDistribute.
The most interesting development as of late is the progress of Blacksky. It is the first major attempt at creating an independent "Bluesky Instance"–where in that it's functionally the same as Bluesky but doesn't rely on any of Bluesky's infrastructure.
There is also Wafrn, which is really hard to explain. @gabboman@app.wafrn.net is in this thread somewhere and will have to explain it.
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