Decentralization and erasure: Blacksky, Bluesky, and the ATmosphere
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Decentralization and erasure: Blacksky, Bluesky, and the ATmosphere
https://privacy.thenexus.today/decentralization-and-erasure-blacksky-bluesky-and-the-atmosphere-2/
There's been a lot of discussion about whether or not Bluesky and the ATmosphere (the ecosystem using the AT protocol) are decentralized. Blacksky runs three feed generators, a moderation service, and a work-in-progress personal data store (PDS) as well as providing a starter pack. And the vision for Blacksky "extends beyond any single platform".
That sounds pretty decentralized to me!
But as far as I can tell, nobody else in the discussion is talking about Blacksky as an actually-existing example of decentralization. What's with that?
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Decentralization and erasure: Blacksky, Bluesky, and the ATmosphere
https://privacy.thenexus.today/decentralization-and-erasure-blacksky-bluesky-and-the-atmosphere-2/
There's been a lot of discussion about whether or not Bluesky and the ATmosphere (the ecosystem using the AT protocol) are decentralized. Blacksky runs three feed generators, a moderation service, and a work-in-progress personal data store (PDS) as well as providing a starter pack. And the vision for Blacksky "extends beyond any single platform".
That sounds pretty decentralized to me!
But as far as I can tell, nobody else in the discussion is talking about Blacksky as an actually-existing example of decentralization. What's with that?
The Appendix of Decentralization and erasure: Blacksky, Bluesky, and the ATmosphere is a roundup of various articles and posts on the question of whether or not Bluesky and the ATmosphere are decentralized and/or federated. There are lots of interesting perspectives here, including from @laurenshof on @fediversereport, @cyrus, @cwebber @bnewbold, @rysiek, @jonny, @possibledog, @oblomov, @rwg, and @Kye. Every single one of those posts was worth reading, and I really appreciate the time everybody's put into it.
That said, it's still very strange to me that as far as I can tell none of you mentioned what seems to me an actually-existing example of decentralization on Bluesky today.
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The Appendix of Decentralization and erasure: Blacksky, Bluesky, and the ATmosphere is a roundup of various articles and posts on the question of whether or not Bluesky and the ATmosphere are decentralized and/or federated. There are lots of interesting perspectives here, including from @laurenshof on @fediversereport, @cyrus, @cwebber @bnewbold, @rysiek, @jonny, @possibledog, @oblomov, @rwg, and @Kye. Every single one of those posts was worth reading, and I really appreciate the time everybody's put into it.
That said, it's still very strange to me that as far as I can tell none of you mentioned what seems to me an actually-existing example of decentralization on Bluesky today.
Interesting to look back at this five months later ... here's what's currently happening today in terms of decentralization the ATmosphere.
@rudyfraser.com@bsky.brid.gy announced today that Blacksy feeds and moderation service are now powered by our own atproto relay -- and it's an independent implementation, not using Bluesky's reference code. It's really worth reading the thread, which has a great analogy for how a relay enables custom feeds.
@edavis.dev has configured deer.social (a third-party app) to to point to a self-hosted bsky appview which reads from a self-hosted relay which subscribes to a self-hosted PDS which is where this -- as he says, "Bluesky independent from Bluesky".
@bnewbold published A Full-Network Relay for $34 a Month, updating his post from last summer. The network size has increased by close to an order of magnitude since his first post; the cost of a realy
#FreeOurFeeds is donating a $50K to the AT Community Fund to support the #IndieSky working group. The notes from last week's Ahoy IndieSky Europe give a sense of the energy here -- and also link to a bunch of other projects that sure look decentralized to me and discusses the prospects of Eurosky.
Of course, like I said in the article,
""Decentralization" means different things to different people. As the links in the Appendix highlight, people who are focusing on the (very real) concentration of power in the ATmosphere today, or the potentially-centralizing architecture of AT, find it more useful to describe Bluesky as centralized."
And the power concentration -- or "operational centralization" as Bluesky folks were calling it at the ATmosphere Conference -- is still very real. Bluesky still runs almost all of the infrastructure for the ATmosphere, and it's by far the most popular app, and most other apps (as well as Bluesky) use the Bluesky AppView, Relay, and labeler.
Then again, that's clearly in the process of changing, and it'll be interesting to see how it looks six months or a year from now.
@laurenshof @fediversereport @cyrus @cwebber @rysiek @jonny @possibledog @oblomov @rwg @Kye
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Interesting to look back at this five months later ... here's what's currently happening today in terms of decentralization the ATmosphere.
@rudyfraser.com@bsky.brid.gy announced today that Blacksy feeds and moderation service are now powered by our own atproto relay -- and it's an independent implementation, not using Bluesky's reference code. It's really worth reading the thread, which has a great analogy for how a relay enables custom feeds.
@edavis.dev has configured deer.social (a third-party app) to to point to a self-hosted bsky appview which reads from a self-hosted relay which subscribes to a self-hosted PDS which is where this -- as he says, "Bluesky independent from Bluesky".
@bnewbold published A Full-Network Relay for $34 a Month, updating his post from last summer. The network size has increased by close to an order of magnitude since his first post; the cost of a realy
#FreeOurFeeds is donating a $50K to the AT Community Fund to support the #IndieSky working group. The notes from last week's Ahoy IndieSky Europe give a sense of the energy here -- and also link to a bunch of other projects that sure look decentralized to me and discusses the prospects of Eurosky.
Of course, like I said in the article,
""Decentralization" means different things to different people. As the links in the Appendix highlight, people who are focusing on the (very real) concentration of power in the ATmosphere today, or the potentially-centralizing architecture of AT, find it more useful to describe Bluesky as centralized."
And the power concentration -- or "operational centralization" as Bluesky folks were calling it at the ATmosphere Conference -- is still very real. Bluesky still runs almost all of the infrastructure for the ATmosphere, and it's by far the most popular app, and most other apps (as well as Bluesky) use the Bluesky AppView, Relay, and labeler.
Then again, that's clearly in the process of changing, and it'll be interesting to see how it looks six months or a year from now.
@laurenshof @fediversereport @cyrus @cwebber @rysiek @jonny @possibledog @oblomov @rwg @Kye
And now, futur's zeppelin.social is a Bluesky-compatible AppView with the complete history - 16TB of data, so $200/monrh ... not dirt cheap but not horrible (for comparison, chaos.social is $400/month with 6K active users, and infosec.exchange's admin Jerry spends about $5000/month on the various instances he runs).
https://whtwnd.com/futur.blue/3ls7sbvpsqc2w goes into detail on the project, and https://bsky.app/profile/bad-example.com/post/3lscmaacjcs2j is an example post from the (non-Bluesky) deer.social client to thje (non-Bluesky) zeppelin.social AppView via the (non-Bluesky) Blacksky atproto.africa relay. Impressive!
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And now, futur's zeppelin.social is a Bluesky-compatible AppView with the complete history - 16TB of data, so $200/monrh ... not dirt cheap but not horrible (for comparison, chaos.social is $400/month with 6K active users, and infosec.exchange's admin Jerry spends about $5000/month on the various instances he runs).
https://whtwnd.com/futur.blue/3ls7sbvpsqc2w goes into detail on the project, and https://bsky.app/profile/bad-example.com/post/3lscmaacjcs2j is an example post from the (non-Bluesky) deer.social client to thje (non-Bluesky) zeppelin.social AppView via the (non-Bluesky) Blacksky atproto.africa relay. Impressive!
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@thenexusofprivacy and is all that to be able to support one user?
No, although I'm not sure at what point the per-user cost starts to be significant.
If you want a cheaper single user AppView, you're better off running AppViewLite, which focuses on low resource consunption (and more functionality that the default bsky app).
