TORFdot0

That definitely makes it accessible to newcomers. But costs are going to gatekeep smaller communities from hosting relays as the network scales. There are plenty of obscure conversations happening on the far corners of the network that don’t concern the majority, requiring a full network mirror of this activity just increases cost for minimal perceived benefit.

There does need to be some level of seeding, I think the big push for getting starter packs and the like into Mastodon is an example of that need. At the same time, it’s hard to justify spending the money on extra storage and computer just so I can see posts on furry bluesky or some other niche but highly active community.

Being subscription based is what makes it feasible for smaller instances to exist on the fediverse. If every instance had to be a full mirror of the network only a few small groups could afford to host instances.

Almost nothing decentralized yet…

You can host your own PDS (making it distributed but not decentralized), there is an ability to host a relay but hosting a relay requires mirroring the entire network instead of just subscribed nodes like AP, making it cost prohibitive for communities to organize their own relays on ATProto.

If bluesky is serious about decentralization then they need to make mirroring the entire network optional, allow relays’ firehoses to only to stream the activity from subscribed accounts from their users and federate with relays that don’t mirror the entire network.

I would curious to see if you could access piefed using Voyager for Lemmy as a front end. It’s about the only decent app for Lemmy that doesn’t squash things on my iPhone mini with text zoom enabled

Thank you for sharing, that’s exactly what I was looking for!

Humans are social creatures by nature. The goal should be to improve our social interactions instead of letting others exploit them for profit

You can’t put that tube back in the tube of toothpaste

Corporate rot sounds better than just rot as enshittification happens on purpose due to seeking to extract maximum value from something where as rot is just a natural consequence of atrophy over time

I’ve read over the documentation a few times and maybe I’ve missed it somewhere else but I’m not aware of any option to host a relay yet. As far as I know only self hosting PDS’s are an option now (which only handle your own data and authentication but still relies on a relay to serve you content from the rest of the network) and app views (which are the front ends that sort and show content)

So in a sense bluesky is distributed and portable within the ATProto network, but still centralized until other entities can host relays and interopt (or opt out of interoperability) within the network.

You are still using the bluesky relay to connect to the network, right?

Have they opened up federation to support other relays yet?

So ATProto that bluesky is built on has 3 core aspects. PDS’s (personal data server, stores your account content and data), Relays (transmits your actions such as likes, favorites, replies etc), and Appviews (basically the front end that you use to convert the data to a human readable front end like the bluesky app)

PDS’s are allowed to be hosted by others right now but Relays are not. So even if you host your own PDS on the bluesky network, you rely on the bluesky controlled relay to be able to interact with the network.

In theory there is a future where other people can host relays on the network but it’s not that way right now and is likely going to be too cost prohibiting for the people hosting to ever be realistic.

The idea would be the servers would have shared ban/block lists and similar rules so that they can share the load of having open sign ups.

Basically a coop of instances to improve on-boarding. If you join the coop then you get added to the pool of instances that get assigned normies at random.

If the authentication was federated it’d be ideal as well but I assume this would be outside the scope of AP and would cause issues if you tried to post from your mastodon.social account from mastodon.world’s server for instance.

The bridges are singular points of failure. If the bridge you use goes down you lose all your audience that was on that bridge. It’s better than nothing however. I will consider normies using threads and Bluesky a win as much as I can but it’d be so more ideal if we just all were on open and truly federated protocols instead of relying on half measures