this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2025
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It's great that Bluesky is gaining traction, but how sure are we that it won't turn to shit before other relays come online and make it actually decentralised?
My tenuous understanding from an article I read about the AT protocol but barely remember is that it can't be fully decentralized. I think you have to use bluesky for user authentication. And I think it said the hosting hardware requirements would be significant to the point where it's not very feisable. I welcome corrections/clarifications.
Point is, assuming that's reasonably correct, true decentralization isn't possible. And by it's nature as a big corporate owned site, enshittification is inevitable.
Yes, apparently their protocol sends everything to every node, so it would overwhelm anything but a very powerful and expensive server. The Fediverse's ActivityPub protocol is more efficient and only sends traffic where it is needed.
This was true for a while but they're updating the sync protocol to support sharding etc. people are running full network relays off a raspberry pi
The authentication parts uses a standard w3c developed format called DID. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_identifier it's basically a more general form of a url that must point to a specially formatted file. There are several did methods. atproto supports did:web which stores the doc at a user-set http URL path, and also did:PLC which stores the doc in a special database controlled by bsky. They plan (hopefully) add more methods in the future.
But yeah, the currently supported did:web authentication method is fully independent of bsky inc
It's federated in name only.
I blame ActivityPub. W3C didn't get their shit together when they invented the standard and now we are paying the price.
Or just users being too stupid. I do not see any real problems with AP
it requires a very large investment to run a node, but the fact that it’s possible means it’s open by necessity, which means we can bridge to mastodon etc
this means that it will be a lot easier for people to migrate, since they don’t have to give up their entire social network
imo it’s a good jumping off point: people clearly have problems with the mastodon “on ramp” and are having no issues with bsky, so imo it’s a step in the right direction and we can’t let perfect be the enemy of better