TIL : The bluesky ecosystem is called Atmosphere.
this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2025
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Mhm, and their protocol is called AT Proto. The fediverse's is ActivityPub.
The "rest" number for bluesky is actually a lot bigger than i thought. Still embarrassingly small tho.
I think people don't have a particularly solid grasp of why you'd want "decentralization". Or at least I don't agree with the common take.
Admittedly the common take seems to be decentralization is important because more decentralization is more better, as far as I can tell. Personally, I don't think there's intrinsic value in decentralization, the value is in the functionality. Decentralization is a bit like the right to strike. It's super imporant to have. You don't want to not have it. You only use it if you need it, though.
The point of decentralization or interoperability is supposed to be that if there is a dealbreaking choice you can move the whole setup to somewhere that is not making that choice. But beyond that scenario, having one big thing is often going to be more practical than having many tiny ones. There is no real value in everybody hosting a tiny instance of a thing. It'll be less reliable and massively less efficient than a large consolidated host.
To put it another way, the difference between having one person controlling a service and having two people controlling a service is huge. Fundamental. Changes the whole game. The difference between a million people controlling a service and two million controlling a service is negligible. There is no effective competition between a bunch of similar computers all running the same software.
the difference between having one person controlling a service and having two people controlling a service is huge
If the control is split 50:50, then yes. If the control is split 99.5% to 0.5%, the difference is negligible.
That's the part where we disagree and I disagree with the group.
I think the argument that spinning up a full Bluesky replacement is too expensive is valid. I think the argument that the central Bluesky service being the majority of the landscape is a bad thing is not.
If someone can spin up a replacement, even at great cost, it means that if and when the service gets bad in the main instance people can create a different big replacement. Whatever made the original viable remains in place, so the incentives should be the same.
That is the big difference between two being possible or not. Especially if, like AT does, you have proper account migration (still a glaring gap in Fedi services).
You don't need a lot of decentralization for that to be true. Way I see it, the obsession with this particular metric is a purity test used as a marketing tool between competitor more than anything else. That pisses me off quite a bit because, frankly, I'm very tired of all the endless infighting in all the progessive spaces, from Linux development to FOSS in general to alternate social media to straight up left-wing politics. It sucks a lot and I don't particularly respect anyone who engages with it.
If someone can spin up a replacement, even at great cost, it means that if and when the service gets bad in the main instance people can create a different big replacement. Whatever made the original viable remains in place, so the incentives should be the same.
That assumes that the biggest player keeps playing by the established rules even after deteriorating otherwise. But if the biggest player controls virtually the entire market, they can change the rules at will.
For instance, let's say BlueSky suddenly switches to a new protocol, which happens to be proprietary (or they extend AT in a proprietary manner that breaks compatibility). Can you still offer a competing AT service? Sure. But the 90+ % of users who are on BlueSky aren't going to drop everything to switch to your service, which has virtually no users or content, just because you use the protocol BlueSky used to use. Most users are there for the content, not because of the technical implementation.
That's the point of the whole federalized service thing: To keep one single party from being able to dictate terms to everyone. But just like in any market, that relies upon no one having an overwhelming market share. Right now, BlueSky has an overwhelming market share. They currently aren't abusing it but they have the power to do so.
That makes no sense. How is that any different from forking out of Fedi apps? This has happened a ton of times.
Look, I don't mean to dump specifically on you, but I do hate this slippery slope fallacy crap, and you hear it a ton in these circles. What if Bluesky decides to defederate from itself or stop using an open protocol? Well then that's bad. Also it hasn't happened, there's no indication that will happen and it would make no sense for it to happen considering Bluesky made AT willingly and could have just... not done that in the first place.
I mean, what if Mastodon.social defederates and stops using AP? What then? Huh? Well, nothing because it hasn't happened it's unlikely to happen and if it did the rest of the space would have to reconfigure around it.
I swear, we need to stop this. The small fish infighting is such a great way to keep the big fish in place. If you want to get depressed at the ability of more open alternatives to be functional in general, the insane fact that only BS managed to sorta capitalize on Twitter and then Twitter managed to keep itself in place and recover is a massive failure. We should all be doing a lot of soul-searching about how badly we suck at organizing and pushing a cohesive message because man, did they try hard to fail and we just wouldn't let them.
I'm not sure I can follow your argument here.
One the one hand you argue that because they haven't enshittified yet, they will never do so in the future. That doesn't square with how any platform ever has worked out, especially when VC money is involved. Sure, BS is run by a benefit corporation but even they have to turn a profit at some point. Besides, the best of intentions can be quickly diluted or even forgotten when a leadership change happens.
You also argue that if BS defederates from everyone, the rest of the ecosystem can just go on without them. The problem there is that in that case, the rest of the ecosystem has little reason to do so. Bluesky minus 99% of its users and content has very little going for it; the network effect is huge in social media. The third-party AT services would go from being part of Twitter's greatest rival to being Mastodon but with fewer users. Also, BS would have little to lose in that scenario; virtually all users and content would still be there. In comparison, if BS only had a 60% market share, defederating would lose them enough content and activity to be a very unappealing prospect.
Also, the argument you're going against is not that BS is inherently bad, it's that the AT market is currently centralized to a sufficient degree that the benefits of federalization can't fully come to play. The argument is not "fewer people should use Bluesky", it's "more people on Bluesky should be using third-party AT providers". There's a subtle difference here: The argument people are actually making isn't aiming to diminish the AT ecosystem, it's aiming to make it more resistant to unilateral enshittification.
No, that's not what I'm arguing. We've gone from slippery slopes to straw men, apparently, much as I hate calling out the play.
I'm not arguing that because they haven't enshittified they won't enshittify. I'm arguing that because they haven't enshittified, they haven't enshittified and there is no indication to make it more or less likely that they will, how or when.
Big difference. You are implying, if not arguing, that there is a slippery slope towards a specific hypothetical scenario, but there's no indication of it and even in that hypothetical there is no indication that the situation would be any worse than in the alternative you present. It's just fallacious through and through. I don't need to argue that they won't ever enshittify for that to be a bad argument.
And by the way, you keep doing it. You immediately go back to a scenario in which BS defederates from itself and from a protocol they built, designed and presented as a USP in the first place. It remains obviously fallacious. I have no need to argue about a version of reality you made up, or to defend the inexistent version of players or events playing out solely in your head.
That last paragraph is a lot more valuable, though, but it is just restating the point I already addressed earlier. My point is that how many people are using third-party AT providers is entirely irrelevant, just like the number of fedi people not on mastodon.social is entirely irrelevant. The point of having a standing protocol is that people could move in the future. If BS did make very fundamentally bad choices people could conceivably move over then. The benefits of decentralization don't exist until you have to move instances. There is nothing in your interaction with the service that is better because it is decentralized. In fact, decentralization makes a number of things harder to implement. But the presence of the possibility of defederation or migration fundamentally changes how service and instance owners can act by removing a BIG chunk of their leverage over the userbase's data, relationships and content.
People here don't like to hear it, but in that sense AT is actually more robust than AP. Account migration including follows and messages is a major part of that flexibility and it impacts that stickiness more than whatever the current distribution of users happens to be in a scenario where nobody is doing anything particularly shitty.
I would argue that even that flexibility is overstated. Once thing that we learned the hard way when people got weird about federating with Threads is that being decentralized does not mean you're endlessly resilient and forks or disagreements that split the collective management down the middle can do really bad damage.
While we're calling out improper arguments I could accuse you of using a motte and bailey argument there as you've gone from "there’s no indication that will happen" to "there is no indication to make it more or less likely that they will". But I think this is more a case of communication being inherently imperfect, in both directions.
I didn't say that they will inevitably enshittify, just that this has been the case with all mass-user services I am aware of, especially ones with VC funding behind them. Investors generally don't throw big money at a company unless they expect some kind of ROI in the future. It's perfectly reasonable to assume that BS has a similar potential for enshittification as other social media services and to want it to be robust against that.
It makes sense to focus on an unhappy path here as the whole point of federated social media is to prevent or counteract that; the happy path is that they offer a great platform forever and federation barely matters. The AT protocol can provide a safeguard against certain types of platform misbehavior but not if one single service controls so much of the market that in the event of a split any other service immediately becomes irrelevant.
By the way, I chose the scenario I chose because I do consider it a likely path towards enshittification. If they need to monetize their user base because the investors want their money back, alternative AT services can break that monetization – e.g. if they were to aggressively push ads, other services could offer an ad-free experience and siphon off users, especially with AT's account portability feature. That's nice for the users but not so nice for the company. So how can they make the investors happy? By keeping people from fleeing, such as by breaking federation – or just account portability.
Of course, instead of a hard break, they could just pull a Kerberos and simply add important features to their implementation of AT that other services don't get. Either way, the point is that any overwhelmingly large actor can undermine a supposedly open system. They don't have to, but hey can.
That's a failure state of the system itself; it can't properly bring its strengths to bear. And that's precisely the issue here. AT is in theory more robust than AP but in practice features like account portability rely on everybody playing by the rules. If BS control 99% of the AT market, they can choose to ignore the rules without significant repercussions.
While being overly picky about federation can harm a platform, so can putting all eggs in one basket.
No, I have not backpedalled my argument. You can't claim I said a thing I didn't say and then accuse me of changing my position for restating my point. I mean, you can, but it's some bullshit and it's not gonna fly. That's why I don't like calling out these things in public, it really brings the Google out of people.
I claimed there is no indication that it will happen the first time, you claimed that I was saying it would definitely not happen and I restated that no, what I said is there was no indication that it would go one way or the other. So no, there is no indication that it will happen.
You can keep pushing your hypothetical all you want, it won't get any or more likely. You've decided to make up that scenario in reverse, because you have chosen a football team to support and are now imagining ways to justify that selection. The exact same scenario could be played out in reverse. If you're building a doomsday scenario out of whole cloth you can get as convoluted as you want and say it seems likely to you. I could poke holes on it, and there are plenty to be poked, but that'd require accepting the premise and arguing about the hypothetical instead of reality. That's why it's a frequent fallacious argument in the first place. So we're not doing that.
Meanwhile, in the real world, the argument you're doing mental gymnastics to bypass is still that interoperability and decentralization only actualize when people need to move. The amount of concentration prior to people moving is, and remains, irrelevant, at least in relation to the importance of the feature existing in the first place.
I generally agree, except in the case of Bluesky specifically.
They have enough control of their protocol and platform to effectively be proprietary. The "decentralized" idea there is not much more than a marketing gimmick.
I mean, if you're just gonna say the quiet part out loud... yeah, people just don't like that Bluesky implemented a different version of AP in a corporate site and are desperately seeking ways to differentiate it and find exceptions to the rule because the whole "everything should be interoperable with everything" thing was always kinda bullshit and what people meant was "everybody should be in our playground where everything is interoperable among the things we like inside our playground".
I find both of those versions of interoperability more appealing than everything being siloed and consolidated, but it was a disappointment to come to that realization. Which, granted, happened with the whole Threads federation debacle. Fedi fans going through that loop a second time and being impotently angry at Bluesky from a distance is relatively benign in comparison, except for the part where both should have integrated much more closely by now and both are being harmed to at least some extent by being slow at moving that forward.
I just would have liked for everybody involved to have been less dumb about this and maybe to have killed Twitter instead of letting its ambling zombie eat their lunch all over again. But here we are.
the insane fact that only BS managed to sorta capitalize on Twitter and then Twitter managed to keep itself in place and recover is a massive failure.
The fact that you ignore the massive amount of investor money they spend on keeping that place, shows how little you know about any of this.
It's straight up disingenuous to claim fediverse failed to capitalize on anything because it's not meant to replace the giant echo chambers funded by billionaires. It tries to accommodate what it can. People are free to try it and move on if that's not their cup of tea. It's meant to be a place for small communities to have their own place on the internet without being brigaded by bunch of malicious anonymous trolls. Unlike you, other people, with mostly marginalized voices think very highly of it.
You don't have to accept it or you can stay perpetually mad at why everyone isn't using your favorite protocol or platform. I think there's enough room for all of us to be mad at some thing on the internet.
I am not ignoring that. Why would you assume I'm ignoring that?
I am aware of that and I am, look at me in the eye, 100% meaning what I'm saying.
There is by any and all framings around this case, zero reason anybody should be on Twitter anymore. It was a perfect death spiral. And there were competitors coming at it ranging from a TON of funding and closed ecosystems (hi there, Threads, someone remembered you exist) to fully open standards.
Also, spare me the back strain of limboing under the increasingly low bar. I was there on Masto when the Twitter implosion happened and nobody was out there lowering expectations and saying it was disingenuous or unrealistic to expect fedi would capitalize. It was a feeding frenzy and a massive party and people were drawing up plans for how to host 200 million people because scalability was a concern. And then that same hype came to Threads theoretically having hundreds of millions of people who happened to have an Instagram account, and then to Bluesky actually building some stable userbase in the old school web 2.0 startup fashion.
And they all stalled. It is not disingenuous to observe that. It is revisionist to pretend that people expected them, and Masto specifically to stall. That was not what happened. Until people started infighting about whether the tone of the place supported activists or minorities or whether federating with Threads was convenient or starting a blood feud with Bluesky because that's more fun than losing a fight to Twitter, I suppose.
I hate the navel gazing and the excuses and the patting oneself in the back for a good failure. I am so tired of people choosing ineffectual self-righteousness over genuine impact.
Not as tired as I am of normies refusing to drop their bad online habits, for the record. Twitter continuing to exist at all, even if no competition was available, would be a travesty. But the self-serving arguments about why it's cool for fedi to be unpopular or the endless purity tests in the relationships with Threads and Bluesky are exhausting and depressing as hell.
The importance of decentralization is that it prevents monocultures from strangling the ecosystem and causing collapses. AKA it helps prevent the boom/bust cycle in capitalism (monoculture) ecosystems. Which you touch on.
There are a lot of assumptions to unpack in that and this may not be the right place for it, but I'm not convinced that centralizing servers implies locking down the culture of the space. Or, perhaps more accurately, that having multiple servers does anything to prevent the culture from consolidating. I don't think Fedi gets accused of being particularly culturally diverse, honestly.
I think it prevents that culture from being built from the top down (or overmonetized from the top down) through unpopular or unilateral choices. That's a thing. But becoming less culturally unified? Haven't seen evidence about it.
I do get that people believe that. They'll spend ages arguing about what service or instance to join and whatnot. The end result tends to be fairly similar. I'll say that the main differences are dictated by design, rather than intent or moderation, and that's been an interesting thing to see play out.
Think what you will. But the evidence to the contrary is fairly obvious one simply has to look at how various instances interact.
I have. I've been in various instances on Mastodon. I am not in Lemmy right now, in fact. I keep forgetting because it impacts nothing.
There are two things instance interactions seem to drive: self-referential arguments about defederation and defederation.
Defederation is not a culture-building tool, though, it's a moderation tool. A very unsubtle cluster bomb of a moderation tool, but a moderation tool. The entire point of interoperability, in fact, is that content is instance-agnosting. That's the basic concept of the feature. If the content was fundamentally different across instances then federation would be fundamentally broken.
I genuinely don't know how people argue with a straight face that "fedi is like email, it doesn't matter what you run, everything speaks to everything else" but also "what instance you pick is super important and completely defines the culture". Those two statements are clearly mutually exclusive.
The truth is closer to the former than the latter, by design.
😂 sounds like you're just not aware enough. Take lemmy.worlds stance on advocating violence vs other instances.
Without federation that distinction would not exist. The same types of variances exist for tons of things:
nsfw content.
Ai allowed va ai content banned.
Twitter links banned vs not.
Pro Palestine vs pro genocidal assholes.
Pro luigi vs hail corporate.
The list goes on and on for the variances. Variances that are never allowed to exist on platforms that are not decentralized. See reddit/twitter/facebook.
Hence the statement 'the instance you pick is important'. Because it can dramatically change your experience.
Anyways im done interacting with you. Nothing interesting will be gained on my end from this conversation.
This is demonstrably untrue. Those things are fundamentally no different than blocklists. Like I said, a very blunt moderation tool, not a cultural diversity tool.
This isn't a problem of awareness. Like I mentioned above, I am well aware of all the endless circular arguments about federation and defederation happening all the time all over Fedi. They are pointless purity tests, in most cases, but they're unsurprising, because the core culture of the place is fundamentally about this design choice of making big moderation blocks be handled at the instance-to-instace level (very much at the cost of moderation tools for and towards individuals, since blocking is basically nonexistent, instance managers don't have a ton of bandwidth or resources for granular moderation and don't have control over moderation in other instances).
That's a good example of how the design impacts the culture: putting defederation in the way it is and weakening blocking to barely a mute does affect the culture across the system, but it does nothing to tweak that culture beyond moderation in other applications, in the same way that blocking every nazi you meet on Twitter does nothing to change the culture of Twitter. The patters of behavior are still what they are, you're just cherry picking content generated via those patterns.
So no, no lack of awareness, just a different understanding of how this works.
Like i said you're simply unaware and unwilling. Not our problem. Those example differences are exactly what give rise to diversity of culture.
And yes its unaware since you cant comprehend how they give arise to cultural differences you cant be aware of how they influence such changes. Again not our problem.
"Our"?
What "our" is that? Who's "we"?
I mean, I've been around a while, so it can't be "us Fedi dwellers", since... you know, I'm pat of that, so I would be part of the "we", so surely you meant something else, right?
Because man, would it be some weird self-defeating irony to imply that in a thread where one is defending a mostly vibes-based argument that the culture in "our" place is actually uniquely diverse and free-form due to the way the thing is designed. That'd be a remarkable self-own.
So I'm sure it's not what you meant.
Look, deal with it however you need, I don't particularly mind, but it's one of many self-serving, semi-deliberate misaprehensions people around here like to lean on to dismiss the current limitations of Fedi's setup, and that habit does bum me out. Because, you know, being part of this community, despite your implications, I would like for it to be more popular than it is. Not fully mainstream, perhaps, because I do like the weird, cozy mid-90s forum feel of the thing, but... yeah, a bit.
And definitely I would have liked to see Masto put up more of a fight instead of being steamrolled by Elon. That was a legitimate bummer.
If you actually identified a problem and eposed an alternative approach worth discussing this conversation would be playing out differently.
Did I ever claim to be trying to do that? I mean, it's starting to get convoluted, but my initial point was that people attribute effects to decentralization it doesn't have by itself, so the differences between the more consolidated Bluesky ecosystem and the less consolidated Masto ecosystem in particular aren't as meaningful as the graph in the OP suggests.
You were the one who popped up to claim that decentralization prevents monocultures. I just disagreed with that statement and pointed out that... yeah, that's one of the magic effects people claim that don't seem to really happen.
Whether that's a problem or how big of one is entirely up for debate. All I'm saying is it's not much of a real advantage, as far as I can tell. I'm both here and in BS, so I clearly don't find either that effect or the lack of that effect to be a dealbreaker, if it exists at all. I'm claiming it doesn't exist in the first place.
My educated guess is that what would meaningfully change how this conversation is playing out is me unequivocally siding with the home team and bashing the away team. The fact that I'm not necessarily bashing either (or at times I'm bashing both) is perceived as hostility or siding with the away team, because people have squishy brains and that's how the Internet works and all social media was a mistake.
no you're just overall confused and I dont particularly care to enlighten you on the topic given your current lack of cognizance and you have yet to demonstrate any nuanced understanding at all on how dynamic systems work and how bluesky's ecosystem will inevitably crash and burn due to the monoculture it has builtin to its very core via the corporation overseeing it (boom/bust cycle).
There are other larger problems within bluesky's protocol that will prevent it from surviving as well which are intentional to ensure the administrative control for the corporation backing it.
The blocklists have nothing to do with anything besides ensuring a happier user base.
Go read Chaos by james gleick i guess and come back. thats probably the gentlest primer I can suggest.
edit: and then follow that up with reading about anarchist political theories (its related i promise)
Hah. That is a shockingly... optimistic? take in a world where even Twitter didn't crash and burn. I would ask how resilient that level of delusion is to observable reality, but refer to my earlier comments about social media and squishy brains.
Whatever you say champ.
I mean, it's not, though. Things either happen or they don't. You made a prediction that does not match reality.
you're just a incredibly dense individual. No worries though twitter will continue to hemorrhage its user base as its slide into irrelevance continues.
That's... entirely delusional. Every stat I can find shows Twitter running pretty much flat since the whole mess started. It's an order of magnitude larger than Bluesky (which itself seems to be down 15-25% this year) and two orders of magnitude larger than Masto, which is also flat YoY.
There is zero indication that Twitter is declining further and certainly if it is at all those users aren't going to Fedi, BS or any other federated networks. Even if you believe that most of it is bots now it's still bigger even discounting that, by most estimations, and it's not shedding either users or bots towards decentralized networks.
At some point wishful thinking stops being optimism, you know?
Shrug keep living in your dream scape. I dont have to convince you time will take care of it eventually.
How is it a dreamscape? I don't like it. I don't want it to be that way. It's just... what reality seems to be based on every piece of information we can get from it. Time is moving things in the opposite direction you're hoping for.
Your dreamscape is thinking numbers you have no way of verifying in any way tell a story.
The fact is the damage to twitter has been done socially and its on its way out. It'll take time for people to find their new home and move over but its occurring and will continue to accelerate as time goes on.
I mean... yeah, I do have ways to verify them. For one thing I can get more than one source, which I did. For another this is not data pulled out of thin air, there are multiple proxies for web traffic. It's not like we've built a entire worldwide economy of advertising and attention without any tools to get at least some notion of how may people are putting that attention where.
Is the Twitter brand damaged? Certainly. I wouldn't touch it with a very long stick, myself.
So is Meta and Google and Apple. And yet, for as much as we are all aware that Meta actively participated in genocide and spied most of the planet illegally you know how their social media performs? Facebook is up to 3 billion users, Whatsapp is the default form of communications of big chunks of the planet, their social brands dominate social networking worldwide.
So hey, if you have some semblance of a timeline for when this social damage does anything practical I would appreciate a hint, because from down here in the real world it's not looking particularly likely any time soon.
See, you don't get to forecast the downfall of your political rivals on a limitless timeline. I am in agreement that Elon Musk will die sometime before the sun expands and engulfs the inner planets of the solar system, but that's not much of a realistic prediction of Twitter's performance in practical terms.
You didnt verify shit the only people who know the real number of twitter users is twitter and even that is up for debate given the prevelance of bot accounts. And its in their best interests to lie about the numbers.
And yes i do get to forecast its downfall, people are jumping off soon as their primary usecase is supported by other platforms, advertisers are leaving etc etc etc. its essentially a fascist hell hole walking at this point kept alive via funding by a fascist billionaires.
What i dont get to predict is the timeline because that is unknowable since it depends on a bunch of individuals finally pulling the trigger and that can take years even after a person decides to disassociate from the platform. Each individual having different thresholds for jumping ship etc. but as more and more people leave the faster the rest will follow.
The only thing keeping it relevant at this point is political news and that'll disappear soon as another platform get sufficient reach.
Yeah, that's what the word "proxy" means up there. I don't need to get any of this data from Twitter directly to know which direction the number is going and where it is relative to previous years. It's not moving the way you think it's moving. And the numbers work with any number of bots because the size differences are so big that even going with the larger estimates where 3/4 of all of the damn thing is all bots it's still several times larger than either BS or Masto, or even both put together.
Look, it's okay to live in a vibes-driven world, I suppose. I can't force you out of it. But maaaan, does it get in the way of having a normal conversation with someone else about a real thing that happens in the real world where we both need to agree on some semblance of reality.
I'm not even that angry that you are in denial about it, weirdly, but it's mildly alarming and it makes this entire conversation retroactively feel like a massive waste of time.
Yea BlueSky is only decentralised in name.
There's a super interesting post trending on Mastadon right now regarding BlackSky, which is a project setting up an independent and federated Bluesky service including their own custom relay server. So while yes Bluesky is effectively centralized, it is at least technically possible with enough effort to federate and access it from decentralized servers
Also, these numbers are only for user data. Other components are even more centralized including the ones they use to censor speech that their corporation or certain governments don't like.
99.55% that’s two things :
- how difficult it is to build a better world in general
- how much people actually care about it
So what I’m reading is they could defederated from everything else, or fork the code so they’re the only ones compatible and 99% of people wouldn’t notice and probably 90% wouldn’t care.
Edit: not saying that’s a good thing to do. Just pointing out a probability.
That's good to see. Return the internet to the people!
Sure. People don’t use BlueSky because it’s decentralized. They use it because it’s easy, there is a large enough core of users to produce a constant stream of content, and it’s not Twitter/Meta.
Yaaay, I'm glad you cross-posted it 😊 it's a great fit for this comm