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...
  • seaQueue@lemmy.worldEnglish
    191·
    8 months ago

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

  • iso@lemy.lolEnglish
    6·
    8 months ago

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

    The article is all about excuses.

    • Blisterexe@lemmy.zipEnglish
      4·
      8 months ago

      all you have to do is

      1. host your own PDS, where your account lives, this is easy, I do it myself already.

      2. host you own appview: the only actually good appview is bsky’s, luckily it’s open source, unfortunately I do not believe they made it easy to self-host.

      3. Host a relay, this isn’t all that hard, it just needs a real big server (AFAIK it needs a shitton of io throughput), so unless you’re very rich it’s not too realistic to host this.

      So yeah, a PDS is easy to host but the other two parts are a pain, and since the protocol has only been open for a few months, people haven’t really done too much.

      Frontpage exists, but they haven’t made it be able to interact with bsky.Social, although the accounts are shared. I have been told by people involved with that that that’s an issue with frontpage’s implementation, and not the AT protocol

  • blue_berry@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    8 months 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.

  • kbal@fedia.io
    3·
    8 months ago

    Just a hunch, but I think no decentralised network is going to run ATProto unless someone other than Bluesky forks it and makes the protocol changes that would allow that to be practical. I guess it’s possible, in theory?

    • Aatube@kbin.melroy.org
      2·
      8 months ago

      I’ve not read much about their protocol yet, is there a proposal somewhere on what changes are needed?

      • kbal@fedia.io
        2·
        8 months ago

        I’m not sure what approach would work. As I understand it, it’s designed around the idea that all messages get routed through a monolithic “relay” which needs to see every single event from every user in order for any of them to get routed between the PDS nodes where user data gets stored.

        Probably best to just add ActivityPub on top of it, if they really wanted to federate with anyone.