[zoul]

For me, the most meaningful test of decentralization is whether one player can decide what most of the users can see. And that is entirely the case with Bluesky. You can own your information alright, but what is it good for when the single centralized app can decide what to do with them? If the single centralized app gets sour, you will be left with the impossible task of coordinating all your contacts to move elsewhere. If the single centralized app is down, nobody sees anything. How is this progress?

Meanwhile, the Fediverse has dozens of thousands of independent nodes and dozens of independent implementations.

[ks2048]

I haven't experimented much, but I think BlueSky has customizable feeds?

https://docs.bsky.app/docs/starter-templates/custom-feeds

and with an open API, I think 3rd part apps can do their own customization?

[zoul]

The issue is that “BlueSky” is, for most of its users, the centralized official app. If that gets bought and starts blocking or demoting content from “non-official” clients, switching to a third-party client will not help you since you would lose your contacts.

And the longer this centralized situation lasts, the harder it will be to get back to a healthy ecosystem where nodes are truly peers and none of them can hijack the network on its own.

(Also, I am ignoring the complexity and cost of running an AppView. Running a Mastodon server is a $5/month affair, running a BlueSky AppView is several orders of magnitude more expensive.)

[janandonly]

Agree. I am so happy that Dorsey's other open protocol (nostr) went another route. There is no 'official' client, there is just a whole bunch of competing clients, some of which have even attracted some small funding strategies to maintain a development team for the forceable future.

But none of these clients are big enough to push through locked-in features. They all have to play nice (for now, like SMTP and IMAP once did) and be interoperable.

For info, check out Lopp's blog: https://blog.lopp.net/why-nostr-matters/

[makopoison12]

You act like this can’t happen on the Fediverse. Defederation causes people to lose their contacts anyways. The two services by mastodon nonprofit makes up 30% of the active Fediverse. If someone purchased mastodon.social & Mastodon.online and did the same things as in your scenarios the results would largely be the same. People would lose their connections and unlike ATProto they’d lose their content as well.

[andypiper]

This is one reason why Mastodon is setting up a new non-profit to avoid this. https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/01/the-people-should-own-...

[zoul]

Nothing is bullet proof, bad things can happen on Fediverse too. My point is that the Fediverse is much healthier in this regard.

[khimaros]

despite being crypto-adjacent, nostr seems to have mostly solved this problem at least.