~99.96% of all Bluesky users and content is on Bluesky servers.
Bluesky is decentralised in theory, but in reality it is not. Until one entity doesn't own over 90% of the users and content, I really can't see how it can be seen as decentralised.
Comment on Bluesky is more open than you think.
OpenStars@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
I hope I am not adding to the problem here as well. It seems that obviously Bluesky is neither fully centralized nor fully decentralized. Is there a statement about just how much of either it is?
Although that might be complicated - like someone could say that Lemmy is fairly centralized, bc if you block Lemmy.World then you lose half the users and perhaps half the communities (and PieFed even more so, with PieFed.social representing an even higher fraction of users and communities on it).
So there is a distinction between Bluesky the service as it currently is implemented and Bluesky the protocol, the former of which is fairly centralized but the latter is more expandable?
Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Decentralisation is not black and white, and depends on your defintion of the word.
At this point, the problem is that everyone is on bluesky’s servers. There is little technical problems.OpenStars@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
That seems a very good way to phrase it.
The next issue then becomes cost. Which affects Lemmy as well: first there is the requisite effort to set up and self-host even a tiny instance (especially as it relates to potential spam and CSAM attacks), and second the network traffic costs. The latter may be tiny for a single user who only subscribes to a handful of communities, but someone trying to browse All and wanting everything to be available for their perusal (even if deleted soon-ish for storage reasons) will bear a much higher burden. Which depending on local costs may be trivially easy... or prohibitively expensive, but in either case the more data that someone wants to pull in the higher the cost.
And I imagine that Bluesky is either similar, or significantly worse.
irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Bluesky would work better for that, since everything would be on the AppView. Hosting multiple appviews would be intensive on the relays, but different ones could keep content for different amounts of time.
I think AP works better when you don’t need or want all the information to be available at once.
OpenStars@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
One issue for me, and this is also true of Mastodon and by extension Mbin, is that I greatly prefer the voting and focus on a topic area rather than person. X / Twitter / Mastodon / Bluesky is where celebrities go to increase their profits, fame, and relevance, while Reddit / Lemmy / PieFed (/ + nodeBB + flarum + others) are where we discuss matters of import. I'm not criticizing your post here - this is definitely the correct community to discuss such matters:-) - just interjecting my personal preferences into the conversation, to disclose my own biases.
MimicJar@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
then you lose half the users and perhaps half the communities
As a thought, do you really lose them?
For example the “Television” community previously existed on the lemm.ee instance. The lemm.ee instance is scheduled for shutdown. The “Television” community is now hosted on the piefed.social instance.
It has the same users and has the same topics of discussion. Were the users really lost? Did the community really go away?
Let’s pretend Reddit decided it would no longer allow discussion on “Television”. What if BlueSky no longer allowed discussion on “Television”. You’d have to leave those platforms completely. You really would lose those communities. Those users (at least in part) really would be gone.
Is Lemmy.World a big instance? Sure. Would the users and communities really be lost if it went away? I don’t think so.
OpenStars@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
If Lemmy.World went away, then correct you would not "lose" the users as, well you said it, they would simply move to another instance.
But if Lemmy.World remained and you blocked it (if you had a method to do that - it's not easy at all using base Lemmy but it is doable with some older apps or like Ublock Origin filter rules and such), then in that context you would indeed "lose" all of that content. Or like if you got banned from that instance then that's another way that you could "lose" access to engage with communities located on it.
The more centralized something is, like Reddit, the more damaging it is to lose access to it, while the more decentralized, as you pointed out, the less overall effect that perturbations have upon the network.
irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
I just say bluesky because that’s what everyone knows it as. I’m really talking about its network.
Its not very well distributed, because almost everyone is on bluesky’s meganodes.
Its more of a social problem than a technical problem at this point.
Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
35% (16k out of 46k MAU): lemmy.fediverse.observer/list
Kierunkowy74@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
Or even 33% as we should count PieFed and Mbin too (this makes 48k MAU overall). All 3 "apps" make one network.
Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Good point!
OpenStars@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
Nice. I remember when it was 80%, then it fell to half, 40%, and apparently now is closer to a third than half. Excellent decentralizing!:-)