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How decentralized Bluesky is compared to the Fediverse. (europe.pub)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/fediverse@lemmy.world
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cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/45188740

https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/

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[–] 178 points 1 year ago (36 children)

So why does everyone keep referring to Bluesky as decentralized or even comparable to the fediverse

Bluesky is the newest iteration of privately owned and controlled social media

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  • [–] 100 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (10 children)

    Because silicon valley thinks it can define reality however it wants and keep telling us not to believe our lying eyes.

    Weirdly this seems to work better on techy people who don't like thinking about politics but understand the technical details of this extremely well than it does on normie progressives because progressives just see the obvious predatory reality and don't get distracted in minutiae connected to very obviously empty promises.

    The tech press does not ever talk to progressives though...

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  • [–] 25 points 1 year ago* (7 children)

    Does it? None of my normie progressive friends are on the fediverse. The ones that tried it didn't like it.

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  • [+] 4 points 1 year ago (6 children)
    [removed by mod]
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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    No I’m saying the logic and propaganda of corporate social media seems to work on them, despite it being in obvious contrast to their ideals.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    I'm with you. To my knowledge all my irl woke friends ride only mainstream social media.

    I had a local anarchist reach out to me on my ancient FB Messenger of all things.

    I get that it's not the most important part if you're doing prefiguration, but as far as I can tell most people just want to be where most people are, even if it is supporting actually vile corporations.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    Unfortunately not understanding or being sufficiently motivated by the threat of corporate social media is still prevalent among a good amount of lefties I know, but I find even when they are uninterested in leaving corporate social media they can at least understand the logic behind it in a way a lot of techy type people start to just get combatitive when you try to explain.

    Most often when I have a conversation about this with someone who is very technically well versed with computers and the types of systems that are relevant to federated social media their response is to answer every one of my broader ethical questions by changing the topic to a conversation about technical details and they either utterly miss the point or outright refuse to have a discussion about it because they think I am being too cynical.

    Ultimately these people only have one real argument which is to just repeat the mantra "stop being so negative, lets just wait and see before we jump to conclusions" endlessly about the same cycle of bullshit repeating over and over again.

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  • [–] -2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    They didn't mean those kind of progressives. Not the political one. But the ones that actually see beyond VC backed big tech.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    this seems to work better on techy people who don't like thinking about politics but understand the technical details

    Not weird at all; this was the case with cryptocurrency too. Otherwise qualified and intelligent people would invest in centralized scam coins because they had no understanding of economics, just tech.

    It's sad but cool that it works the same way with social capital.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago*

    Intelligence and expertise is worth pursuing for the benefit that comes from learning for the sake of learning, but it is true that there is a danger to knowing more and more about a very narrow subject in that it becomes more and more seductive to believe that the thing you are an expert in is a key to understanding everything else and that this gives you a righteous vantage to look down upon the genius of others and judge from afar.

    Some of the smartest people there has ever been or likely will ever be throughout history have time and time again completely undermined their potential by falling prey to this delusional drug of a belief.

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  • [–] 41 points 1 year ago* (6 children)

    Because, despite being wildly impractical, it's technically built on tech that COULD be decentralized. Only recent a new host launched called Black sky. So it is no longer just one host. But it's been one host for so long it almost doesn't matter because so few people will switch.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago

    Technically, yes, if you squint; but, practically, no. It was designed with a prioritization of passing the information/data around to avoid any lack of missing anything (so you get a closer experience to the connectedness of Twitter than Mastodon) which means every instance hosts, basically, the entire world. Naturally, there's only going to be a few entities that can store and afford to store the entirety of the data of the network. There's no such thing as a small instance, in their protocol.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Doesn't BS have things in it's software that are hard coded to the main server, so it's not possible to make a completely independent host at the moment?

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    They continue to control 100% of the relays so they can control what servers are connected to the others.

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  • [–] [S] 47 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    So why does everyone keep referring to Bluesky as decentralized or even comparable to the fediverse

    They call it marketing, I call it propaganda.

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  • [–] 18 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    "It's the same picture."

    Always has been. The only difference is what they're selling.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago

    I feel like this speaks to an unchallenged myth in our society. That corporate organizations and government organizations are somehow completely categorically different from one another such that they exist in totally separate spheres of reality. But they're both political groups of people, exercising power over the peasants. It's not as different as people think. And they often have similar goals and use similar strategies, like propaganda, to achieve them.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Because Bluesky claims that they want to develop their relay tech into a standard like HTTPS or something, and then hand it off to a nonprofit to maintain so that it's usable by everyone. The tech has the possibility to be decentralized/federated baked into it, but whether or not it will be anything other than a pipe dream/marketing hype has yet to really be seen.

    They present themselves as basically a Lemmy.world equivalent to those who care about decentralization, which is not a significant portion of their user base. For most people it's just a buzzword, I believe.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Wasn't there a similar promise made by Reddit at some point? I remember people referring it to often until it became just some myth ... and then at one point, people just realized it was never going to change and then it became a full blown private corporation that wanted an IPO and became a monolith that never even considered sharing anything.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    I honestly have no idea, that would be going much farther back in Reddit's history than I was on the platform for. It reminds me of Google's "Don't Be Evil" motto, though. It's true until somebody realizes that there's a lot of money to be made doing the thing that you said you wouldn't do.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago* (2 children)

    It's where the useful idiots are being herded. They are using it because it's "not twitter" and other people are influencing them. They don't care about decentralization.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    Would have been nice if they went to Mastodon, but I wouldn't call them idiots. I don't use that media format, but if there isn't a lot of users there, I cant see the service being that useful to the users who do go there. It's like Lemmy struggles with niches. Not enough people, want to find something or ask someone about something, you'll hit a wall and find yourself looking for results elsewhere. Someday hopefully, but that movement from Twitter would have been a great time for activity pub to shine if it hadn't gotten skipped over

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  • [+] 1 point 1 year ago (6 children)
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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    It's not:

    In July 2024, running a Relay on ATProto already required 1 terabyte of storage. But more alarmingly, just a four months later in November 2024, running a relay now requires approximately 5 terabytes of storage. That is a nearly 5x increase in just four months, and my guess is that by next month, we'll see that doubled to at least ten terabytes due to the massive switchover to Bluesky which has happened post-election. As Bluesky grows in popularity, so does the rate of growth of the expected resources to host a meaningfully participating node.

    https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

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  • [+] 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)
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