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Bluesky is more open than you think. (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/fediverse@lemmy.world
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[–] 11 points 1 year ago (18 children)

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?

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  • [–] 16 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    if you block Lemmy.World then you lose half the users

    35% (16k out of 46k MAU): https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago

    ~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.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year 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.

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  • [+] [S] 4 points 1 year ago (9 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    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.

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  • [+] [S] 2 points 1 year ago (7 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    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.

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  • [+] [S] 4 points 1 year ago (5 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Last post 4 days ago, that makes Lemmy look like a beehive

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    I blame this on an UX blunder.

    Bluesky users are taught not to enter their Bluesky passwords to enter different apps, but rather create a different "app password" for each one. Then Frontpage went OAuth which directs users to Bluesky login page. Bluesky brings us a different login page for OAuth use :/ and obviously does not remember that we are already logged in in the same browser.

    This of course means that we have to enter a Bluesky password to a slightly different-looking website - a somewhat fishy way to authenticate a user...

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