Could someone explain the criticism of BlueSky to me, i.e. that it’s less decentralised? Isn’t the AT Protocol set up in such a way that you could build your own social network using it, meaning you can interact with BlueSky users without being one yourself?
As I understand it, the critical flaw with Mastodon and Lemmy etc is that if I delete something on my profile it isn’t guaranteed to be deleted on other servers - that is unfortunately unacceptable in the long run for most people. And account portability isn’t clean, and you are at the whim of your server operator. How is it better?
Isn’t the AT Protocol set up in such a way that you could build your own social network using it, meaning you can interact with BlueSky users without being one yourself?
No. In theory it could eventually become that but Bluesky is not self-hostable.
Are you saying the AT Protocol is not self-hostable, or that BlueSky isn’t? Because if it’s possible to create a BlueSky competitor that uses the AT Protocol, then this criticism isn’t valid. If someone can in theory create an open source BlueSky clone, then it seems like it renders Activity Pub redundant. I’m genuinely curious, I have been trying both out for a while.
Thanks for the explanation. I hope that the fact they’ve set out to create it in the first place shows their intention to open source it - it would be a 180° villain arc move not to
Sadly, it’d be entirely in keeping with every single other corporate social media site ever.
Letting you host your own profile data is just a move to save themselves some hosting costs, every user who stays locked into their system and hosts their own data means they’ll be able to start making money that much faster when they finally hit market saturation and turn heel to enshittify themselves for profit.
Could someone explain the criticism of BlueSky to me, i.e. that it’s less decentralised? Isn’t the AT Protocol set up in such a way that you could build your own social network using it, meaning you can interact with BlueSky users without being one yourself?
As I understand it, the critical flaw with Mastodon and Lemmy etc is that if I delete something on my profile it isn’t guaranteed to be deleted on other servers - that is unfortunately unacceptable in the long run for most people. And account portability isn’t clean, and you are at the whim of your server operator. How is it better?
No. In theory it could eventually become that but Bluesky is not self-hostable.
Are you saying the AT Protocol is not self-hostable, or that BlueSky isn’t? Because if it’s possible to create a BlueSky competitor that uses the AT Protocol, then this criticism isn’t valid. If someone can in theory create an open source BlueSky clone, then it seems like it renders Activity Pub redundant. I’m genuinely curious, I have been trying both out for a while.
Both. ATProto is still centralized, you can host your own profile data but you still need the central service to log in and see it.
BlueSky claims they’ll open-source the central service too but they’ve got no incentive to do so.
Thanks for the explanation. I hope that the fact they’ve set out to create it in the first place shows their intention to open source it - it would be a 180° villain arc move not to
Sadly, it’d be entirely in keeping with every single other corporate social media site ever.
Letting you host your own profile data is just a move to save themselves some hosting costs, every user who stays locked into their system and hosts their own data means they’ll be able to start making money that much faster when they finally hit market saturation and turn heel to enshittify themselves for profit.
https://slrpnk.net/post/17272348?scrollToComments=true
Many thanks for sharing this, I will read it and then come back with my thoughts!