[lolinder]

If there can exist an "extinguish" step for the concept of decentralized social media itself then decentralized social media has already failed. The whole point is supposed to be about changing hearts and minds to embrace self-governance, a rug pull should just result in people moving somewhere else.

[secstate]

But that's sort of why Bluesky is not really decentralized, just federated. It's a pretty significant difference. Mastodon is federated and decentralized. Twitter is non-federated and centralized. Bluesky is trying to be the federated, centralized option.

Whether that works, we'll see. I for one just gave up social media about 8 years ago and, while feeling like I'm missing something flares up from time to time, it's nothing like the disaster my online life was before I gave it up. It wasn't a problem of missing federation or not being centralized. It was inherent to the way social media functions against my person.

[steveklabnik]

How is BlueSky centralized? I could see that argument before this feature shipped, but "BlueSky is trying to be the federated, centralized option" goes counter to what the team has said directly.

I could maybe see an argument not based on technical premises, but instead something like "it will defacto become one because running a relay is too expensive" or such. Is that what you're going for?

[Balladeer]

I'm not who you replied to, but yes, that's my main concern: Bluesky is still a company building a thing to pay back the money it owes investors.

I worry that Bluesky becomes the de facto central actor and, due to having no stated business plan and a countdown to repay the money they took, pulls a Google, leveraging its dominance to introduce proprietary, breaking changes.

Yes, right now, the tech, team, interviews, etc sound mission-driven, but "revenue is the dominant term"[2] in the equation of a company's life, and there's still a very real chance that Bluesky dominates whatever federated AT Protocol network ends up forming, then uses that leverage to walk back all this promised openness.

I'm cautiously interested in Bluesky, but I'm watching for this kind of de facto dominance and we're probably too early on to see where the AT network is headed.

- [1] https://somehowmanage.com/2020/09/20/revenue-model-not-cultu...

[secstate]

Yes. In the sense that Mastodon is decentralized because there is no one Mastodon server. One may accumulate more users or be the "default" for the community of users, but there is no Mastodon server (much to the chagrin of many new users).

We don't even need the hypothetical "it will defacto become..." because Bluesky Social was, up till now, the ONLY way to participate in the community. They had 3 million users before federation, and now we can start to hook into what they've built, but the idea from the start was clearly not built around federation and decentralization, otherwise it would have been federated from day one, as Mastodon was. They can HOPE now, that people accept the federation concept, but there's enough gnashing of teeth around the pain of running Mastodon instance that it seems really clear that going from central to decentral is, if we're being intellectually honest, a bridge too far for most to cross.