Technology

TIL my comment is the top comment.

But the ATProto architecture is still too fundamentally centralized, and thus easily censorable.

Quoting myself from nearly a year ago:

Bluesky is ... arguably 'federated', but it is centralized, not decentralized.

https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20241128-bluesky-decentralization

Their model (AT Protocol) relies on a central, authoritative ... 'Relay', that all 'federated' users and posts on federated PDS (personal data servers) must go through, to actually reach the 'AppView', ie, what all other people/users can actually see.

So, this is not a many to many, tangled spider web of connections, the way lemmy, and other parts of the actual fediverse are.

It is a top down hierarchy, a pyramid.

And Bluesky runs the Relay, the chokepoint.

If Bluesky cuts off the PDS your account is on, everyone on it is now gone.

The actual fediverse, Mastadon, Lemmy, etc, runs on ActivityPub.

In that model... every instance is essentially self contained, and every instance that is federated communicates with every other instance that is federated.

Each instance can decide what other instances they want to federate with... and users on each instance can personally block even more other users, communities, or entire instances if they choose to, but that only effects what that particular user sees.

That is what you call decentralized, approaching, or also having elements of being 'distributed'.

Now, of course, thats a bit simplified, the AppView is actually more complex than that, the 'Relay' is in actuality a bunch of different machines in different physical locations...

... but it still acts as a monolithic layer, a gate keeper, controlled by a board of directors.

Is anybody else running their own Relay yet?

Thats a genuine question, I totally wrote off BlueSky long ago.

If not, this is all still fundamentally the same.

If you just see ActivityPub as 'normal social media that can talk to other servers'... you don't get it.

1. There's no single centralized chokepoint that is under corporate control.

2. Costs of running your own ActPub instance are generally not exhorbitantly expensive, thus the entire paradigm is more 'small d' democratic, has a lower barrier to entry and is thus more practically distributable.