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.