[Groxx]

It's a comparison they are directly inviting, by constantly claiming it's decentralized. And then its defenders get upset when people rightfully point out that there is only a single instance, because that single instance going down takes the whole thing down. Like in Google Reader.

[danabramov]

If atproto app goes down and it’s open source, anyone can put it back up with all public data intact.

Even if it’s not open source, anyone who wants to write the code can still get it back up with all public data intact.

I think it’s a substantial difference with “takes the whole thing down”. Can we acknowledge that?

[Groxx]

if mastodon.social goes down, people would rightfully say that mastodon.social went down even though it's open source and anyone could run their own.

>"But where are all the Bluesky instances?"

I agree that it doesn't mean "atproto went down", and I don't mean to imply that. but "bluesky went down" is completely accurate, and bluesky is the one claiming to be decentralized due to using atproto. there are no other instances in bluesky's network, only partial ones (blacksky, last I heard they were still working on a major piece?), hence the "no it's not" responses. and that's also how they're directly encouraging people conflating the two.

[danabramov]

I’m speaking about the hypothetical situation where an app is blown from the face of the earth, not temporarily goes down. I thought that’s what the parent discussion was about. I’m not sure what we’re discussing now.

All I’m saying is that if a developer forever takes down some atproto app, another developer can put up a new app that shows the old app’s data because the data is actually inside the users’ repositories. This is similar to how if Microsoft ever discontinued Word, you could still open Word documents in Google Docs. Does that make sense?

Re: Blacksky, they do fully run on their own infra now. So it doesn’t depend on Bluesky’s database.

[Groxx]

it's somewhat similar, yeah. minus the part where bluesky itself is by far the majority host of people's data. that puts it more in the realm of "Office 365 Online + OneDrive storage" than "Word" - a lot of people will lose a lot of data, though something resembling it can be started up again. and people with backups (their own PDS) will just move to OpenOffice for a bit.

Blacksky finishing their full forking does finally give them a much stronger leg to stand on for "bluesky is decentralized", though.

PDSes are great and I really wish Mastodon would support something similar. Mastodon's lack of account portability / data ownership / lightweight hosting is a massive issue.

[danabramov]

Yeah that’s a fair clarification. At the very least I think Bluesky hosting should start doing something for automatic backups.

[mozzius]

blacksky does now run the entire stack themselves

[pocksuppet]

Can they? 99.8% of the Blue Sky app data is hosted on the Blue Sky company servers.