[Kye]

You still depend on someone to run another server in the event your PDS (Personal Data Server) goes away. It's just a different, bigger server (Big Graph Service) where the people who run it are even less knowable than those who run your PDS.

Moving data only works in this case if you've thought to attach your DID to a domain you control, and the server you move to connects to the BGS server your data lives on. It's still very unclear how this will work. I suspect it will be like Usenet where most BGS indexers have expiry rules and won't hold on to every post.

This is more complicated than AP and Mastodon where you know exactly where you stand when your server goes down. So many people are going to be burned because they heard it's all portable, but didn't actually understand how it worked, and find they can't migrate their identity or their posts because it all rested under [handle].somehugecentralizedserver.tld.

People who struggle with instances on Mastodon (and eventually, Bluesky) are not going to have an easier time figuring out domains and DNS to make their identity portable. This remains a huge unaddressed issue and should concern people who think Bluesky is easier just because it's unfinished.

[skybrian]

We could compare with git. Sure, you could publish a git repo anywhere, but most people will choose Github, Gitlab, or another large git hosting service. The reliability of these services matters and we’re fortunate that they’ve been quite good so far. People don’t usually use custom domain names when publishing git repos, though I suppose you could?

With Mastodon you can download your data any time, but you can’t actually upload it anywhere else. There is forwarding, but only for follower subscriptions, with the cooperation of both servers. It’s quite limited. There are brownouts from servers getting overloaded and also due to fairly frequent policy disputes. It does let you do more things without making them public, though, and that’s important to many people.

The blogging model where you have actually independent websites, links, and RSS feeds seems better from a decentralization standpoint, but it’s not popular due to the difficulty of getting people to subscribe to your blog.

That’s why we comment here, right? You could post a comment to your blog, but who would read it? Replies are important.