Asklemmy

44149 readers

1433 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

How decentralized is Bluesky/ATProto? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 4 weeks ago by potat@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

9 comments fedilink hide all child comments

(I rewrote the title seven times, I'm just going with this)

I tried Bluesky because of its growing popularity, and I'm confused about its supposedly decentralized nature. Yes, you can "own" your account with a custom domain, but everything else is centralized onto the one instance which is Bluesky - there's no federation or anything like that (?) so I don't see why people promote it as being anti-big corporation even though it may become that at this rate.

With Mastodon/ActivityPub, federated instances connect through the underlying software that they all share. Heck, you can even communicate with other software like Lemmy through the ActivityPub protocol. Sure, I guess you don't "own" your account/likes/etc, but I think it's way better than being locked in to solely one instance and not having the ability to switch if the one your using doesn't appeal to you in some way.

I'm sure I'm missing and/or an incorrect on some information about all this, so I'm really just hoping someone can explain it in a way that I understand.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] underscores@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Personal data storage can be decentralized, although that's missing the social part of the social network.

Identities are set up through a centralized system that in theory they could change, but I wouldn't bet on it.

Relays supposedly can be decentralized, but need to handle all data on the network. So they require massive hosting costs that keep going up as more people use bluesky. Only large corporations can likely afford to run them, and that hasn't happened yet.