How Decentralized Is Bluesky Really?

[cwebber@social.coop]

But worse, we have reached the limits of what is possible to do with a dedicated server. We *have to* move to abstracted storage from this point forward because we're starting to hit the limits of what's offered for cheap dedicated storage on one machine. And this number will only grow, and as said previously, is growing at an enormous rate.

[cwebber@social.coop]

I have spent a lot of time focusing on the cost of storage, but storage is only one cost required. These estimates have been done so far against servers that *nobody is actually using*. The cost of servers that people are using will be much higher, because more needs to happen than just store things.

And that is not even to mention the challenges with administrating, dealing with takedown requests, illegal content, etc, which are probably much more serious.

[cwebber@social.coop]

Let's take a break, the analysis of server costs is boring and I don't like doing it, and I'm sure people will throw numbers at me of the absolute race-to-the-bottom hosting numbers they can find to store and run all this stuff, but really that's not interesting to me.

Let's do a comparison.

[cwebber@social.coop]

Remember that the idea of "fully self-hosting" on Bluesky/ATProto at this point is primarily abstract; nobody is really doing it. But of course there's a place where tens of thousands of people are running their own servers for millions of users, and that's the fediverse/ActivityPub.

[cwebber@social.coop]

As said, tens of thousands of people are self-hosting *today*. Fediverse software doesn't just scale up, it scales *down*.

GotoSocial is cheap enough on resources where you can run it for family and friends on a raspberry pi or spare laptop you have sitting around.

[cwebber@social.coop]

Now you're hitting the point in this thread where some of you may be thinking "aha! this is where Christine is saying that the fediverse/activitypub are awesome and atproto is terrible!"

you have NO IDEA HOW MUCH I CRITICIZE THE FEDIVERSE ALL THE TIME, I do it all the time, and will later here

[cwebber@social.coop]

The fediverse has a lot of flaws. Oh trust me, we're gonna get to that.

But comparison-wise: what I mean to say is that architectural decisions matter, and scaling up isn't the only thing that's important, *scaling down matters too*.

If you care about decentralization, anyway.

[jalefkowit@vmst.io]

@cwebber This is great. Thank you for taking the time to write it all up.

One thing I like about this space is that people on all sides seem collegial. They acknowledge the issues with their own solution and praise the strengths of others. You don't get that much anymore.

[cwebber@social.coop]

Now look, we're about 1/3 of the way done here, there's a lot more to say, and a lot more said in my article, it's about 24 pages long if you print it out.

This is because in the age of TikTok I somehow have decided to model myself after David Foster Wallace, sorry

"Consider the Fediverse" I guess

[cwebber@social.coop]

But now, I will break for lunch. Enjoy your intermission because I will be back. We still have to get through the remaining 2/3 of the analysis, after all.

======= LUNCH BREAK HERE =======

[cwebber@social.coop]

Okay I am back from lunch, time to resume my analysis thread for "How decentralized is bluesky really?" https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

I have been receiving a lot of notifications, I am not reading any of them until I finish with this so bear with me, BEAR WITH ME, we're gonna make it through

[cwebber@social.coop]

And before we make it any further can I say that I watched a nice medley of David Bowie and Cher singing, and it was so lovely https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPlN8RBP-Ws

@mlemweb said "of course it's very heteronormative despite having two queer coded icons on the stage and ISN'T THAT THE WAY I guess

[cwebber@social.coop]

But where was I? Oh yes. We had talked about why PDS'es aren't enough (blog/google analogy), relative costs of hosting things on ATProto vs ActivityPub, etc etc

But we haven't gotten into the really interesting parts which are the structural analysis stuff, so let's move onto that

[cwebber@social.coop]

Now you may be saying, "Christine, this is really unfair, because you're looking at ActivityPub servers which are only dealing with a small amount of the network, what if it were an ActivityPub mega-node? What are the costs THEN huh?" and "What if we hosted just PART of ATProto?"

What then INDEED

[cwebber@social.coop]

ATProto is not designed for the Relay and AppViews to only hold part of the network, not *really*, and ActivityPub is. We'll get to this in a moment.

But Bluesky actually has good justification for this! I will defend it insofar as Bluesky was making a serious *design decision*

[cwebber@social.coop]

Remember the directive that Bluesky was given: develop a decentralized protocol which Twitter can adopt. That informs a lot of things, and has meant that Bluesky was really very ready for this moment!

If you're an ex-X-Twitter user then by god, you're going to be amazed! It's just like Twitter!

[cwebber@social.coop]

This informs some other things:
- Bluesky's gotta scale BIG and do so FAST (scaling down: not a priority at all)
- It has to be something Twitter can adopt (of course, not anymore, but initially)
- Everything on ATProto is public (yes, everything, including your blocks btw, we'll get to that)

[cwebber@social.coop]

But here's the other thing. People have trouble with the fediverse! All those decentralization decisions get in the way, my god, you've got to choose a server, search doesn't work well (actually it could but it's a cultural thing, different topic), and worst of all:

Sometimes you DON'T SEE REPLIES!

[cwebber@social.coop]

Actually all these critiques of the fediverse are TRUE, these are known challenges, and actually it's not really so bad, but it could be better, and at any rate, Bluesky made a major decision to simplify a lot for new users, and they have. Things seem to just work for people! Incredible!

[cwebber@social.coop]

The thing you often get seen thrown around is "it's amazing, I had no idea a decentralized protocol could just work like that! How on earth did they solve that in a decentralized system and so FAST too!"

It's simple: all those things "just work" because Bluesky is centralized.