[ttiurani]

> the promise of decentralisation

AFAIK actual decentralization needs still a big engineering effort.

I personally can't even imagine a world where their VC investors would ever sign off a "let's make it possible, easy and risk free the users to exit our silo" project, over the many ways they try to squeeze profit out of their users.

[jacob2161]

Bluesky is built on atproto, which is designed to be "locked open" in a way that can't be rescinded. That was a core design constraint.

VCs funded Netscape which did more than any other company to launch the web and they made a lot of money without having to destroy the ideals of the web.

[evbogue]

The PDSes (personal data servers) can be independantly hosted, but Bluesky itself indexes and presents the messages these servers contain in their social-app. Bluesky also maintains the directory of these servers.

[jacob2161]

Anyone else is also free to run these services (app views, relays) and a few people already are doing this.

An atproto PDS is like a structured-data blog hosted on a web server. Anyone is free to index, relay, and render the data.

[evbogue]

Yes, and running these things is prohibitively difficult such as I've only witnessed two full index attempts and no alternative plc directories.

Bluesky should make these easier so your average Linux admin can attempt to host the full stack, as opposed to only being able to host a PDS. This would eliminate the criticism about Bluesky's design.

[anon7000]

AT Proto isn’t really supposed to be about individuals self hosting the whole thing. The system is supposed to be global, distributed, and shared, not isolated to one person self-hosting the whole stack. One person should be able to host a resource and connect it to the network (esp to host their own data). It’s just a different design goal compared to full-stack self-hosting. Fundamentally speaking, you can’t run Twitter at scale on a home laptop. But if lots of people band together their resources by hosting distributed microservices, they can self host it together. That’s what AT Proto is trying to solve

[jazzyjackson]

If it was more DNSy it could be hierarchal. I should be able to run my own stack and treat is like an RSS feed, subscribed to the various domains and individuals I'm interested in. Larger (but not huge) players could create plc directories of users and various aggregated feeds. Why have the expectation to host the global firehouse just because you want to customize how relays and appviews work?

[culi]

Agreed. If you wanna be able to host the whole stack you should just use Mastodon

[bnewbold]

If you want a service which indexes every post in the public network, including from folks you don't follow, that is just going to require resources. I think $200/month for a full-network index (as zepplin does) is very reasonable and approachable for organized groups without external funding. Many Mastodon instances cost more than that, and provide a must smaller scope of indexing.

If you want a small scaled down setup for just a small community, which still interoperates with the full network but doesn't have a complete network, there are setups like AppViewLite, which can run on, eg, an old laptop at home: https://github.com/alnkesq/AppViewLite

Personally, I don't think individualist self-hosting is a necessary or helpful goal for indexing the network. Most humans are not interested in spending the time or learning the skills to do this, even if it was as easy as setting up a self-hosted blog with RSS. I think small collectives (orgs, coops, communities, neighborhoods, companies, etc) exist and can fill this role.

Regardless, this is moving the discussion, which was about whether it was possible to decentralize each component the network, not whether it was pragmatic for individuals to self-host the whole thing.

[ttiurani]

> I think $200/month for a full-network index (as zeppelin does) is very reasonable and approachable for organized groups without external funding.

I didn't know about these recent attempts, they're impressive for sure. However they write[1] about zeppelin:

"The cost to run this is about US $200/mo, primarily due to the 16 terabytes of storage it currrently uses"

So when you here give that $200/mo cost as a price point for "organized groups", you are forecasting that the cost of storage will go down as fast as the BlueSky data size grows? At what rate right now is the data size growing? Because the last numbers I saw were something like 2TB, so it being already 16TB sounds like $200/mo is not going to be enough very soon.

[1] https://whtwnd.com/futur.blue/3ls7sbvpsqc2w

[dingnuts]

> I think $200/month for a full-network index (as zepplin does) is very reasonable and approachable for organized groups without external funding.

That's crazy cheap! Everybody on HN should be able to run one of these, just cancel your Claude Code Max subscription

All kidding aside, that's incredibly cost effective and heartening to read. I expected the cost of running a relay to be much higher.

[evbogue]

> Most humans are not interested in spending the time or learning the skills to do this[...]

Well, this is exactly my point. ATProto's infrastructure is too hard for most humans, and that is the reason for the centralization complaint.

The team's goal should be to make it easier, so the complaint goes away.

[jacob2161]

I agree there's a lot of room for improvement in making it easier.

But certain things like full-network relays/app views just have inherent bandwidth/storage/compute costs associated with them but it's definitely something a non-profit (like Internet Archive) could easily afford to do.

The PLC service could likely be hosted for ~$40/mo.

[bnewbold]

hundreds (thousands?) of users have signed up for Bluesky Social, then moved their accounts to independent hosts. folks can use https://zeppelin.social/ as a totally free-standing bluesky posting experience that interoperates with the full network.

Bluesky Social still clearly dominates the ecosystem, but there is no single component of the system that does not have a open/alternative option for exit.

Do you disagree? Is there a specific centralized component you take issue with?

[ttiurani]

> there is no single component of the system that does not have a open/alternative option for exit.

Users can move their follows, followers and posts to zeppelin.social fron BlueSky transparently?

Now you can of course debate on what "decenttalized" means, but in a social network easy migration between servers is the crucial feature that would allow the decentralized network to emerge.

Edit. Does the network actually work over at zeppelin.social alone if Bluesky servers go down?

[bnewbold]

Yes, all of those social graph relationships are hinged off a permanent identifier (DID) and everything comes along when accounts migrate PDS instances. Folks can use zeppelin.social from any PDS instance. The DID PLC directory is currently hosted by Bluesky, but the directory can be forked, and did:web identifiers can be used as an alternative (and several independence-minded folks in the network do so).

Migration between servers is so seamless that is causes confusion and doubt that the protocol even supports migration, because there is basically zero in-app visibility of which users are on which server.

Yes, the network continues to work on zeppelin.social if Bluesky servers are down.

[jcgl]

> Now you can of course debate on what "decenttalized" means, but in a social network easy migration between servers is the crucial feature that would allow the decentralized network to emerge.

I totally agree. However, a lot of people in the fediverse/ActivityPub world apparently (?) disagree, seeing as your domain is tightly coupled to your server, i.e. no name portability. Seems like a wild oversight to me, and getting massive instances like matrix.org and mastadon.social seems like an inevitable consequence.

Lack of name portability implies greater risk when choosing a server. Greater risk when choosing a server means choosing comparatively less risky servers. Choosing comparatively less risky servers means choosing more well-known servers. Thus you have the GMail-ification of the fediverse.

[FiloSottile]

> Users can move their follows, followers and posts to zeppelin.social fron BlueSky transparently?

Yes, even if Bluesky was down (as long as they have a backup) which is not the case for ActivityPub.

[isodev]

Even if set aside the details on dependence on bluesky infrastructure, the effort to host “all components” is quite expensive and technology-intensive with significant cost for storage and compute. For example, a deployment of “all the things” (just for you) is in the ballpark of 70-100€/month because the way things are designed to work. And that’s not even factoring the burden of managing the whole range of technologies involved.

Making it hard to setup or run, complex to understand or change are also forms of discouraging independent use.

[egypturnash]

zeppelin.social just gives me a black page with a stylized yellow scarab on it on desktop Safari, Mac Firefox, and Mac Chrome, with or without adblock.

[isodev]

Same, that’s why I said “the promise of”. Also how do they plan to bill actors in this decentralised system? Is it going to be developers footing the bill? Some premium features only “the main Bluesky instance” has? It’s not clear to me at all.