I'm sad to see the Matrix team repeating the lie that Bluesky is decentralized in their recent post [1]. When you look at the distinction between the two, it’s clear as day that we either need to stop calling Bluesky decentralized, or choose a new word...
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I'm sad to see the Matrix team repeating the lie that Bluesky is decentralized in their recent post [1]. When you look at the distinction between the two, it’s clear as day that we either need to stop calling Bluesky decentralized, or choose a new word for things that actually promote a network without megainstances and centralization.
Running a single Synapse server is enough to chat with your friends, completely in isolation. Two groups running Synapse can talk to each other without any interference from a third party, and you can self-host sydent or ma1sd or what have you for the identity API, too. You store and transmit the data required for conversations you participate in.
Running a Bluesky PDS, on the other hand, gives you control over your own data, to an extent, but Bluesky-the-company, or some other large entity, must be involved in order for you to talk to anyone else, because running a relay is expensive and legally risky. While you can argue this is technically “decentralized”, it’s qualitatively different from the way that things like Matrix and ActivityPub work.
Twitter has a single center. ATProto is designed to facilitate a network with a few centers rather than one, and views megarelays like bluesky.network as a success; a relay that isn’t enormous is a failure. Matrix, ActivityPub, and so forth are designed for a network with thousands of small “centers”, none of which need a complete view of the network, and the community tends to view mega-instances like mastodon.social, matrix.im, etc. as failures of the system.
