this post was submitted on 19 May 2025
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I stopped reading when the "journalist" asked this question:
How little research must one do to credulously repeat that PR talking point for a platform that is in fact completely centralized?
I think that it's fair to want the interviewer to ask more critical questions and in general be more precise with their phrasing but
is a very cynical and uncharitable take on bluesky and decentralization. Cynical takes aren't necessarily wrong but they're not necessarily correct either.
The AT protocol is by its own account an ongoing project with problems that still need be solved before it is able to provide a social network with all the properties that they're interested in.
I don't think that it's accurate to say that bluesky is "completely" centralized (it is less centralized than most social media) as much as it's de-facto centralized. One reason for this is that it's prohibitively expensive to self-host relays. This is something that the AT protocol devs have plans for addressing, so it's possible that this de-facto centralization is a temporary stage in the evolution of bluesky and AT proto.
It is of course possible that they are lying or that they will be unsuccessful despite best intentions but taking for granted that it's just a "PR talking point" is, once again, very cynical in a way that I don't think is completely motivated.
That's like me calling myself a millionaire because I could theoretically be one at some point in the future. I am de facto not a millionaire, but I also have more than zero dollars. so I'm not completely a non-millionaire.
I stopped at the bit about revolutionizing communication online. That revolution happened over a decade ago with the rise of social media. More social media is just more, not new.
Decentralisation via activitypub is the next revolution
or possibly something else, but definetly not atproto as it stands
Yall are so annoying. Bluesky is 2 years old. Mastodon is like 8 years old. Also theres already another instance and relays running on a raspberry pi.
Yall have such a hate boner you dont even do research. No wonder normies will never use mastodon or lemmy yall are insufferable and mastodon is still just a copy of twitter with no new features
Oh, when did twitter add CWs that required a clickthrough? The ability to set your own character limit? When did it remove its algorithms to show you posts it considered relevant? When did it become open source? When did it become decentralised and federated? When did it start working on end-to-end encryption for DMs? When did it allow for built in themes?
Do you have a link to people talking about running a relay on a raspberry pi? I find it hard to believe that's possible. A PDS, sure, but a relay requires multiple terabytes of storage alone and plenty of bandwidth/CPU/RAM that I just don't see a raspberry pi being able to support.
I'd be curious to hear about any progress on setting up new relays though.
Which will increase heavily in the coming years. Blueskys "de"centralization is basically - use one of three instances, and probably pay for it sooner or later because it's fucking expensive.
We don't have a hate boner. We see "decentralized" being thrown around like a buzzword and we know that it really doesn't apply to their platform.
It's like the Libertarian Party taking the word "libertarian" and flipping the meaning to describe their ideology.
It's a distortion of the spirit of the word and actual libertarians obviously want to clear up the misunderstandings that result from being introduced to the concept of libertarianism through such a group.
Bluesky’s model is built in a way that means it won’t ever be decentralized. There are plenty of articles about it.
What new features does Bluesky have...?
Being a centralized decentralized platform of course. Very innovative.
Someone clearly has never used context menus or opened their account settings in Mastodon.
Reddit is now decentralized, I just set up nginx to cache it🤡
Oh wait, PDS' don't even cache lol
Oh yeah? I can join that second server right now and communicate with folks on the main server?
Do you have a link to the raspi instance?