How Decentralized Is Bluesky Really?

[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.

[cwebber@social.coop]

Now yes, they are using decentralized techniques. Remember when I said content-addressed storage is a good idea and the fediverse should do it too? IT IS! (And as I also said, it's actually fully possible for the fediverse to do, more on that later.)

But the reality is, it's still *centralized*

[cwebber@social.coop]

In every meaningful way from a power dynamics perspective *EXCEPT* the category of "credible exit" (which I am saying and agreeing is a good idea!) Bluesky is centralized.

MAYBE another big corporation could come along and host all this stuff but that's adding a Bing to our Google

[cwebber@social.coop]

Yes, you can host your own PDS. You can also host your own blog. But try hosting your own PDS and NOT hosting a relay or AppView and you can't do much.

Blogs are decentralized, Google is not.
PDS'es are decentralized, Bluesky is not.

[cwebber@social.coop]

We're getting to the point where we get to why I'm so damn frustrated about this and have been biting my tongue until it nearly comes detached from my mouth: users THINK Bluesky is decentralized because they're TOLD Bluesky is decentralized

AUGH! *That's* what drives me nuts.

[cwebber@social.coop]

Here's an example of this problem in action

fry69: "The working search box was the second thing that impressed me on Bluesky, I thought that was not possible with a decentralized model"

Sorry fry sixty-nine I regret to inform you the reason search works so well is that it's centralized! THAT'S WHY

[cwebber@social.coop]

So hold on, let me set some terms for "decentralization" and "federation" that I think are reasonable.

> Decentralization: the result of a system that diffuses power throughout its structure, so that no node holds particular power at the center.

Pretty reasonable. Do you agree? I hope so!

[cwebber@social.coop]

Okay how about "federation" now because this is a *technical term* that the *fediverse has established* and I'm kinda PO'ed about the goalposts being moved on this one.

A lot of people coming to Bluesky have never heard of "federation" before in a social network so listen up this is important!

[cwebber@social.coop]

Here's my definition of federation:

> Federation: a technical approach to communication architecture which achieves decentralization by many independent nodes cooperating and communicating to be a unified whole, with no node holding more power than the responsibility or communication of its parts.

[cwebber@social.coop]

Now historically, federation has been achieved on the fediverse via "message passing". Actually, this is to the degree where I just always associated message passing with federation, but really, federation is about the distribution of power, creating an abstract whole in a sea of autonomy.

[cwebber@social.coop]

Maybe there is another way to achieve federation, but it's about the power dynamics. It's a technical immersion of power dynamics, the flow and interchange of cooperation between many parts.

So you may say, well, doesn't ATProto have that? After all, messages flow through the different parts!

[cwebber@social.coop]

ActivityPub, as it turns out, follows the actor model of computation. Okay, many people implementing the fediverse don't know about the actor model aspect of ActivityPub but I am here to tell YOU, dear reader, that it is an important thing, not a detail

[gaelan@cathode.church]

@cwebber I question the assumption that a relay needs to store the entire network to be useful. Just gathering every reply/like/follow/etc that mentions one of my posts (and perhaps the posts of people I follow), and throwing everything else to /dev/null, would already be hugely useful, and if things are storage-bound (as sounds the case) might be dramatically cheaper.

(To be clear I broadly agree with you here, but seeing as all my friends seem to be ending up on bluesky I've done a lot of thinking about how I can be On There as independently as possible)

[cwebber@social.coop]

I'll take one more note about federation which is that often time the message passing mechanism of the fediverse is often called "federation", but theoretically another mechanism could exist, but I'm actually not so sure of that.

There's a reason the actor model and the lambda calculus are undying

[cwebber@social.coop]

Oh god Christine said "the lambda calculus" did you know she's into lisp and functional programming, what's she going to talk about next monads?!?!

I am not going to talk about monads. Not TODAY

But we do need to get a better architectural idea of how these systems work because it matters a lot!

[cwebber@social.coop]

So let me introduce two models of communication which we can use to analyze these two systems. It's important!

- Fediverse/ActivityPub: "message passing"
- Bluesky/ATProto: "shared heap"

Okay, cool, terms established, let's talk about them and why they matter because they matter A LOT

[cwebber@social.coop]

"Message passing" is what ActivityPub uses. It's "like email", people say, and that's true.

Actually it's even a lot like physical mail. You write a letter, you say where it should go, it gets delivered to your house.

Message passing. The world runs on it.

[cwebber@social.coop]

Now I can use message passing to send a message to you *directly* and indeed, that's "like email". For one-to-one correspondence, that's enough.

But it's not enough for a followers/following type mechanism. But we can build it on top! Thank *you* computational abstractions!