Haven't we learned by now that approximately no one cares? Centralised services are vastly more popular than federated ones, the main reason being that they reduce the paradox / paralysis of choice when you're signing up for them. (Solve that problem properly and you may be on to something.)
Definitely agree that centralized services have a lot of advantages. Bluesky deserves some criticism for trying to have their cake and eat it too, though. They told a good story about being decentralized, and lots of people repeated it while ignoring technical experts pointing out it's not true. Even on HN, the claim that they're decentralized was repeated a lot.
No. This isn’t true. Bluesky has always been very transparent about exactly what flavor of decentralization they offer. The whole thing is swappable microservices you can host yourself, including the relay if you really care. The relay is an optimization to make their app offering work in a performant, scalable way.
The relay is described here and here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.03239, https://atproto.com/guides/glossary#relay
The protocol Bluesky is built on is certainly decentralized. It’s really fucking annoying that people act like it’s not “real” decentralization, when in fact it’s just a different flavor of decentralization on the technical level compared to, say, the fediverse.
Exactly. There's a lot of dogmatic hype with atproto, which is kinda giving me early crypto/NFT vibes. Any discussions or criticisms are quickly snuffed out or labeled as toxic or uninformed, or devolve into whataboutism.
A lot of the content on bluesky, but especially in its early days, is about how the protocol is great, its potential and what bright future it will lead us into. Their main investors are a crypto bro company. Their CEO has built her career around crypto. It's the same rhetoric.
Now it's about decentralized "verification". They still haven't defined what they're verifying except a vague term "the person posting is who they say they are", but it's not actual identity verification.
The endgame is probably monetizing the protocol by connecting it to some form of identity for crypto-bs or paywalling engagement via the verification.
I'm pretty sure the ATproto answer to that is "don't bother users with that decision", i.e. just point new users to somewhere (be it bsky.social or some other PDS provider) and call it a day. This "works" from a decentralized/federated point of view because ATproto supports migrating accounts/identities between PDSes even if the old PDS is offline or adversarial, and because account/identity hosting (i.e. the PDS) is decoupled from the app itself (i.e. the appview) - so even if you signed up as @foo.example.app instead of @foo.bsky.social, you can still log into Bluesky as @foo.example.app (and likewise, @bar.bsky.social can still log into Example App), and if Example App (or Bluesky, for that matter) ever kicks the bucket you can migrate your account (and its followers, and very likely its public content, and possibly its private content if that was backed up somewhere) to someplace else.
I thought I had it (mostly) solved with fediverser: users would go to one place, sign up with OAuth to the service they wanted to leave (Reddit, Twitter...) and the system would behind the scenes create an account on any of the participating instances. In doing so, it could leverage the user existing information (subreddits subscribed, users followed on Twitter) and find the corresponding subreddits/users that are already registered.
Turns out the biggest challenge was not in getting users, but in convincing admins to join the network. Instances with open registrations are already dealing with spammer accounts, and none of them was excited about the idea of this extra vector for having unvetted users on their services.
This doesn't mean that centralized services are safe, though. I am reasonably convinced that we can have "social media" that is less focused on "platforms" and more like what we (used to) have with web: companies and institutions owning their presence by running ActivityPub "servers" on their own domain, and a hotch-potch of community/commercial servers to serve the users who want "basic access".
But to get there, we need to stop thinking that the way to get rid of Facebook/Twitter/Reddit/Instagram/YouTube is by taking their templates and tacking "but federated!", and we need to really come up with a killer app on ActivityPub (or Solid, or Linked Data, or ActivityPods) to disrupt the whole thing entirely.
> Turns out the biggest challenge was not in getting users, but in convincing admins to join the network
The incentives for homeserver admins are extremely perverted and it's why the Mastodon network in particular is so dominated by ideological cliques.
Running a homeserver is thankless, laborious, and expensive, and the costs go up with each user. There's no money for it, so admins have to be compensated another way. Either they get off on the power, or have an ideological axe to grind and thus moral compensation, or they are altruistic and eventually burn out when they are subjected to the abuse of the job.
The financial story has to be solved. Admins must be paid to run services or the services get distorted to compensate them some other way.
> The financial story has to be solved
You are preaching to the converted. :) [0]
I might be wrong, but I think that my instance was the first to provide accounts only to paying subscribers, and even today there are only 2 others like mine.
[0] https://mastodon.communick.com/@raphael/114365227998082545
Yup. Mastodon has this issue. Can’t pick a big generic instance because it could get defederated for spam/being too normie; can’t pick a small instance because it could get defederated over some ridiculous drama [1][2].
Normal people (and even some not-normal people) don’t want to deal with that. “Instances” are a bad model.
[1]: https://tootworld.social/@lilythelonelygirl/1143999833553083...
[2]: https://tau-ceti.space/@lo__@mastodon.social/114394202556951...
Yeah mods of an instance have the power to do so for the sake of their users (in their view at least).
Your comment also implies their actions affect all other instances just by seldomly doing this action. Which isn't the case.
We can cherry pick all day, but one cannot take the whole Fediverse down like it happened with Bluesky. Which is the topic at hand.
I don't think the instances themselves are the problem. It's rather the whole defederation mess. If this had been left in the users' own hands rather than the server operators, it wouldn't have been an issue.
After all email is very federated and it works fine. And people have no issue grokking it. The implementation matters.
Maybe, but I think a lot of people are more acutely aware of the risks of centralized services lately, and I think BlueSky likely got a popularity boost by pretending to be decentralized.
I wouldn't be so dismissive of the importance when people succumb to the realization that it's like VHS/Betamax, but instead of Bruce Willis in Die Hard, at stake is literally half of your friends and acquaintances.
Email has solved federation / decentralisation long before WWW.
Nobody is confused when you hand them a user@gmail.com, user@hotmail.com, etc; I use my own user@whatever.com and sometimes get a blank stare, until people realise you can go to www.gmail.com to check your own inbox, and you can totally just type www.whatever.com into your browser.
Links like reddit.com/u/user, youtube.com/@user, already exist and are de facto a standard of some kind. If we stop trying to make @user@whatever.com a thing, the only obstacle is in convincing people that whatever.com/user is just another link you can click, and this is totally how they can reach you - send you a message.
Federation between servers is an entirely different topic, but for the purpose of this discussion we can assume it's just an implementation detail - just like SMTP is for GMail users.
I'm probably making this sound more trivial than it actually is, but IMO all you have to do is build up on existing paradigms and collective understanding.
It's funny you mention gmail and hotmail. That's exactly my point. Who is setting up their own email server when they could instead sign up for one of those? Is it even 1 in 100,000 email users?
(I say this as someone running my own email server, who periodically has problems sending to gmail.)
> Who is setting up their own email server when they could instead sign up for one of those?
About the same number of people who set up their own WWW server, modulo the absolute PITA that is email.
Still, federation between GMail, Hotmail, iCloud, Yahoo, ProtonMail, etc does work. You don't have as many choices but it can still feel overwhelming if you're shopping for an alternative. People at Corp & Co use their @corpnco.com addresses daily. My personal email is connected to iCloud, but I can always point my MX elsewhere. Running your own Mastodon instance is costly - however fediverse already leans on smaller interconnecting communities.
Nobody sets up an AS just to run some fiber to their home. Decentralisation and federation just happen at different levels and scales.
I would count is as decentralized enough if there are a few major players, you have Google, Microsoft, I assume Proton Mail works fine though don’t know as I only use it for burner accounts, iCloud Mail including Apple’s cool private email relay thing. (Maybe other countries have big providers I dunno.) You can use your own domain and switch between providers if needed, and use custom email clients… it’s all the benefits of decentralization to the end user.
It doesn't matter what instance you choose. An instance is a group, who is part of a bigger group.
But yeah, the majority of people won't ever understand that. And, in all honesty, that's fine.
Really, I'm cool with just having people around who care enough to grasp that. If you care that's cool, if not ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Nevertheless, this discussion is a whole other topic. They are just pointing out a potential issue.
The main reason is that they have marketing of a corporate entity behind them and someone to sign a contract with.
I've seen many times - company switching from free, open-source, distributed solution to a worse, closed-source, coporate-backed solution just so they have someone to sign a contract with.
First time it was moving from self-hosted Jabber to MSN Messanger (is sucked, worked less reliably than self-hosted jabber, didn't worked on Linux, and was probably way more expansive in the long run). Then it was moving from self-hosted wikis to some B2B solution. Then it was self-hosted git to corporate github or sth similar.
I understand the theory behind outsourcing these things, especially if you're just starting. But if you already have the OS solution deployed and working - why switch?
The first startup I worked for had 1 IT guy among 12 people, and everything was in-house, including servers. The second grew to 50 people and did not ever employ an IT guy for internal work - most stuff was run on SaaS and the total cost was less than an IT guy salary. Any admin was done by taking engineering time, and no-one wanted to divert that away from product to do in-house stuff. Because when you're taking time away from product, it's not just the salary but the opportunity cost, because any investment in product is supposed to return a multiple.
And you know what would be even cheaper (in the medium/long term) than the IT in-house or outsourcing to commercial SaaS? If the company took 10-20% of their budget to sponsor the development of FOSS alternatives.