[runako]

When reading any essay about the perils & merits of Bluesky's architecture, save yourself some time by searching for "Blacksky" in the post. If they don't address Blacksky, more than likely the author's understanding of the space has major gaps.

(Blacksky is the/one of the furthest along in building competing versions of each part of the AT proto stack.)

[kevinak]

I know very well what it is, it doesn’t change anything in the grand scheme of things. I wish it did!

[runako]

Re-reading my reply, it is worded more harshly than I intended. My apologies.

I do think it's a critical omission to not address the main player(s?) who are working on key parts of this, and where they may yet run into problems.

[weare138]

But how is that 'decentralized' which was the entire point of Bluesky and the AT protocol to begin with? We're just back to running centralized services. Without decentralization this is just XMPP with extra steps. You might as well just run something like Movim and save yourself the hassle.

[runako]

There's "decentralized" in the sense that every device runs the whole stack. In an analogy to another protocol, this would be like running SMTP and IMAP on your phone and laptop.

Then there's "decentralized" in the sense that the protocols that govern are open and anyone can plug in without permission. This is how email works in practice. Most people do not choose to run their own email servers, but they nonetheless benefit from the fact that people who are interested can do so and provide email service.

Bluesky is the second kind of decentralized.

[verdverm]

> the entire point of Bluesky and the AT protocol

is really to find a good enough middle ground that has competitive enough UX to get people off of the fully centralized, locked in social media providers. In the broader context, ATProto to me means user choice and provenance, which ATProto does better than any other protocol. See all the parts beyond just data hosting, where the entire distributed system is plug-n-play. [1]

ATProto not being purist, preferring pragmatism, is what attracts me over alternatives like AP and Nostr.

[1] https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers

[api]

Does it require people change defaults? If so then 99% will never use it.

A system or protocol is whatever the easiest user journey is. Anything outside of that will never be seen by many users unless there is some value to be gained by going there. And that value has to be something gained now, not a hypothetical like insurance against future closing of the network. People don’t like to buy insurance.

[tpdly]

I think these are reasons that Mastodon and Nostr aren't ever going to have a critical mass of users, remaining a niche thing for people who care about the hypotheticals (which is fine). Imho, BlueSky is the only distributed social media project that has a chance of meeting users where there are with usable search, realtime discoverability, and other consequences of centralizing event-busses.

People wine about BlueSky being too centralized, but the fact is that this type of infrastructure isn't self-hostable. You can do social-media over email a la Mastodon (which admittedly is pretty great), but most people will trade that for a walled garden.

The big problem is that all this AT infra is pretty much charity, which doesn't feel sustainable. I wish it could be funded more like public libraries than ad tech.

[atherton94027]

I mean it's a repo with 1 very active contributor (https://github.com/blacksky-algorithms/rsky/graphs/contribut...), I get that they decided to skip on that

[runako]

(There are multiple repositories owned by that organization, reachable by one click from OP's link.)

[carb]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacksky

[knowtheory]

Anybody can sign up for Blacksky.