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

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

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(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.

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[–] pupbiru@aussie.zone 1 points 4 weeks ago

i mean, mastodon has also been around for a while… i think there are other things that people have raised - relays being expensive etc - that make it less practically decentralised, however even if you have a single mastodon instance that doesn’t make mastodon not federated

the potential is there for less centralisation than currently exists, because they’ve been quickly growing and want to control the roll-out (which is why they had closed sign ups for ages)… i don’t think that necessarily makes it bad - we will have to see how things progress

worth noting too that there’s bridgy fed, so in the future if bsky becomes trash, it should be far easier for people to move to AP

it’s at least a step up, with enough open that it’ll be easier to convince people to make good (ActivityPub) choices in the future - probably when we stop complaining about why everyone is rushing to bsky and start fixing the UX issues with the fediverse that led to them not using mastodon etc instead