Interesting, thanks

I just had a quick look at a random Bsky account:

• https://bsky.app/profile/linuxfoundation.org
• https://app.wafrn.net/blog/@linuxfoundation.org

To see external users you need to be logged in. You can view their profile on their actual instance.

Is the login wall on purpose?

PDSes and relays exist at the whim of Bluesky's corporate entity. Having all of the endpoints on the network controlled by a single agent is what makes Bluesky centralized. If Bluesky decided so, your server can be removed from their network and is functionally useless at that point. They decide who is and is not allowed to be a part of Bluesky.

For contrast, no such governing body exists with ActivityPub networks. Nobody can decide whether or not an instance should be removed from the network, they can only choose whether or not to federate with that instance. If you wanted to truly silence a Lemmy instance, for example, it would take the cooperation of all the major Lemmy admins to defederate, and is an entirely democratic process as a result.

EDIT: To clarify, ATProto is not what is centralized, "Bluesky" the platform utilizing ATProto, is what's centralized.

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?

Christine Lemmer-Webber made an excellent blog post ~6 months ago titled How Decentralized is Bluesky really?

Give that a read.

What about private messages between users?

There are only 15,000 out of 36 Million users that are on servers not owned by Bluesky.

99.96% of users being on one instance isn't Decentralised even if the technology supports it in theory. If 99.96% of users were on lemmy.world, I wouldn't call lemmy decentralised even if the technology allows it in theory.

🧮 Decentralization Scoring System (v1.3)

📋 Breakdown (Estimates)

Source

As I understand (I could be wrong) bridgy is not useful as it could be as it got bullied into being opt-in instead of opt-out.

maybe open technically. but my impression of BlueSky is that it is full of neoliberal status quo apologists. would be happy to be wrong.

People in Turkey are automatically subscribed to a Moderation Service

Sucking the dick of any government is censorship. That's my opinion and it's not the American version of free speech but I dont care because I'm not American.

Very useful, thanks.

As I see it, Bluesky is fundamentally different from Xitter and it is a major step in the right direction. It is short-sighted to reject it because of some technical imperfections.

The fundamental question IMO is whether there is enough mindshare (i.e. users and attention) to allow ATSocial (AKA partial federation) and ActivityPub (AKA total federation) to both be successful. I'm thinking there is. After all, the vast majority of people are still on ad-fuelled corporate social media, with all its internal contradictions.

Is there any way to connect the bsky android app to the atproto.africa relay or a third party appview that uses the atproto.africa relay? I wouldn't mind using bsky more if there was a clone of the android app that doesn't use the bsky relay/appview. Looking at whtwnd it appears to be just web and not native apps?

I would like to host my own PDS and access bsky through a native app using third party relay+appview, but I haven't seen a way to do this yet.

Good post, bookmarked. A lot of fediverse people who react almost reactionary against bluesky are well meaning, but don’t really understand how it works. This is good content, thanks.