[rimunroe]

The Bluesky app view is centralized in that it can decide which content to show, but A) the hosting of that content is decentralized, and B) alternate app views like Blacksky exist which are fully independent of Bluesky (both Bluesky the company and Bluesky the app view). The Bluesky app view could stop showing users content from Blacksky (or any other) PDSes, but that's it. If you're using the Blacksky app view, afaik Bluesky the company can't do anything other than cut you off from Bluesky's PDSes.

[direwolf20]

If by "decentralised" you mean "0.001% of it is not only hosted centrally"

They have designed a protocol that could theoretically be decentralised. Then reality hit, and it was centralised.

[rimunroe]

> If by "decentralised" you mean "0.001% of it is not only hosted centrally"

Sure, much like how email is decentralized in theory but barely is in practice. This doesn’t mean that the decentralized nature is just a marketing gimmick.

It’s unsurprising that almost everyone uses the Bluesky app given that A) the infrastructure for hosting your own relay or app view (I can’t remember which) didn’t have a reference implementation until a while after launch, and B) the user base is much less tech-y than what I’ve seen on Mastodon. Most of the user base moved over in the flight from Twitter/X a couple years ago. I think if it had come out at a different time you’d see something which looked a lot more like Mastodon’s large population distribution.

Also, while this doesn't really matter it looks like the number of users on non-Bluesky PDSes is 1.42% of the total, not 0.001%.

> They have designed a protocol that could theoretically be decentralised. Then reality hit, and it was centralised.

Could you explain what you mean by the underlying protocol having become centralized over time? While I can understand arguing about whether or not Bluesky-the-social-network is practically decentralized to the degree of something like Mastodon or that it became more centralized over time, I think arguing that ATproto[1] itself isn’t decentralized would be ludicrous.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03239

[shafyy]

> Sure, much like how email is decentralized in theory but barely is in practice.

Hard disagree. Email is very much decentralized. Doesn't mean that there's still a long tail distrubtion, but its not like 99.999% of email accounts are on Gmail. And I can set up an email account in a few minutes and by choosing from a list of thousands of providers all over the world.

[rimunroe]

> Email is very much decentralized.

It looks like about 97% of people use iCloud, Gmail, or Outlook as their provider. That doesn't feel like it's terribly different. The people not using one of those big three make up a comparable percent of the total as the number of Bluesky users using alternative PDSes.

Three providers vs one provider does feel very different if those are the only option, but that's not the case for email or Bluesky/AT proto.

> I can set up an email account in a few minutes and by choosing from a list of thousands of providers all over the world.

You can also set up an account on a different PDS and/or use a different app view quite trivially too so I'm not sure that's substantially different.

[evbogue]

ATProto would need to use signing key cryptography and content addressable storage to be distributed. If we can't store our data with third parties or create an offline-first system then it's not a decentralized social network.

[rimunroe]

ATproto does support storing data elsewhere. That’s what a PDS does. I’m not sure what you mean by an offline-first system in this context though or why it’s required for decentralization. Could you elaborate?

[evbogue]

Yes, and it only supports storing one's data in one place. If we use local-first as our measuring stick for a decentralized system then ATProto fails since we can't store the msgs anywhere -- such as on the nodes of my friends. Prior art such as secure-scuttlebot had this figured out, and thus no one ever complained about ssb being centralized.