How decentralized Bluesky is compared to the Fediverse.

TIL : The bluesky ecosystem is called Atmosphere.

Mhm, and their protocol is called AT Proto. The fediverse's is ActivityPub.

The "rest" number for bluesky is actually a lot bigger than i thought. Still embarrassingly small tho.

I think people don't have a particularly solid grasp of why you'd want "decentralization". Or at least I don't agree with the common take.

Admittedly the common take seems to be decentralization is important because more decentralization is more better, as far as I can tell. Personally, I don't think there's intrinsic value in decentralization, the value is in the functionality. Decentralization is a bit like the right to strike. It's super imporant to have. You don't want to not have it. You only use it if you need it, though.

The point of decentralization or interoperability is supposed to be that if there is a dealbreaking choice you can move the whole setup to somewhere that is not making that choice. But beyond that scenario, having one big thing is often going to be more practical than having many tiny ones. There is no real value in everybody hosting a tiny instance of a thing. It'll be less reliable and massively less efficient than a large consolidated host.

To put it another way, the difference between having one person controlling a service and having two people controlling a service is huge. Fundamental. Changes the whole game. The difference between a million people controlling a service and two million controlling a service is negligible. There is no effective competition between a bunch of similar computers all running the same software.

the difference between having one person controlling a service and having two people controlling a service is huge
If the control is split 50:50, then yes. If the control is split 99.5% to 0.5%, the difference is negligible.
- That's the part where we disagree and I disagree with the group.
  I think the argument that spinning up a full Bluesky replacement is too expensive is valid. I think the argument that the central Bluesky service being the majority of the landscape is a bad thing is not.
  If someone can spin up a replacement, even at great cost, it means that if and when the service gets bad in the main instance people can create a different big replacement. Whatever made the original viable remains in place, so the incentives should be the same.
  That is the big difference between two being possible or not. Especially if, like AT does, you have proper account migration (still a glaring gap in Fedi services).
  You don't need a lot of decentralization for that to be true. Way I see it, the obsession with this particular metric is a purity test used as a marketing tool between competitor more than anything else. That pisses me off quite a bit because, frankly, I'm very tired of all the endless infighting in all the progessive spaces, from Linux development to FOSS in general to alternate social media to straight up left-wing politics. It sucks a lot and I don't particularly respect anyone who engages with it.
The importance of decentralization is that it prevents monocultures from strangling the ecosystem and causing collapses. AKA it helps prevent the boom/bust cycle in capitalism (monoculture) ecosystems. Which you touch on.
- There are a lot of assumptions to unpack in that and this may not be the right place for it, but I'm not convinced that centralizing servers implies locking down the culture of the space. Or, perhaps more accurately, that having multiple servers does anything to prevent the culture from consolidating. I don't think Fedi gets accused of being particularly culturally diverse, honestly.
  I think it prevents that culture from being built from the top down (or overmonetized from the top down) through unpopular or unilateral choices. That's a thing. But becoming less culturally unified? Haven't seen evidence about it.
  I do get that people believe that. They'll spend ages arguing about what service or instance to join and whatnot. The end result tends to be fairly similar. I'll say that the main differences are dictated by design, rather than intent or moderation, and that's been an interesting thing to see play out.

Yea BlueSky is only decentralised in name.

There's a super interesting post trending on Mastadon right now regarding BlackSky, which is a project setting up an independent and federated Bluesky service including their own custom relay server. So while yes Bluesky is effectively centralized, it is at least technically possible with enough effort to federate and access it from decentralized servers
https://assemblag.es/@inquiline/115125470539240617
Also, these numbers are only for user data. Other components are even more centralized including the ones they use to censor speech that their corporation or certain governments don't like.

99.55% that’s two things :

how difficult it is to build a better world in general
how much people actually care about it

So what I’m reading is they could defederated from everything else, or fork the code so they’re the only ones compatible and 99% of people wouldn’t notice and probably 90% wouldn’t care.

Edit: not saying that’s a good thing to do. Just pointing out a probability.

That's good to see. Return the internet to the people!

Sure. People don’t use BlueSky because it’s decentralized. They use it because it’s easy, there is a large enough core of users to produce a constant stream of content, and it’s not Twitter/Meta.

Yaaay, I'm glad you cross-posted it 😊 it's a great fit for this comm