Fediverse

Because silicon valley thinks it can define reality however it wants and keep telling us not to believe our lying eyes.

Weirdly this seems to work better on techy people who don't like thinking about politics but understand the technical details of this extremely well than it does on normie progressives because progressives just see the obvious predatory reality and don't get distracted in minutiae connected to very obviously empty promises.

The tech press does not ever talk to progressives though...

Because Bluesky claims that they want to develop their relay tech into a standard like HTTPS or something, and then hand it off to a nonprofit to maintain so that it's usable by everyone. The tech has the possibility to be decentralized/federated baked into it, but whether or not it will be anything other than a pipe dream/marketing hype has yet to really be seen.

They present themselves as basically a Lemmy.world equivalent to those who care about decentralization, which is not a significant portion of their user base. For most people it's just a buzzword, I believe.

So why does everyone keep referring to Bluesky as decentralized or even comparable to the fediverse

They call it marketing, I call it propaganda.

Because, despite being wildly impractical, it's technically built on tech that COULD be decentralized. Only recent a new host launched called Black sky. So it is no longer just one host. But it's been one host for so long it almost doesn't matter because so few people will switch.

How do you algorithmically manipulate those 12M people with Mastodon? BTW, Bluesky has almost 40M users.

I'm pretty happy with engagement in the Fediverse.

Twitter has more users.

So does Reddit but you presumably see some value in federated platforms yea?

portable identity

So like when bluesky starts having to pay back their investors I can portable my identity to.... one of the other blueskies out there?

... but at least the rest of their system is actually substantially more decentralized architecturally than AP is.

In the blog post you linked, neither the author or myself came to your conclusion:

However, I stand by my assertions that Bluesky is not meaningfully decentralized and that it is certainly not federated according to any technical definition of federation we have had in a decentralized social network context previously. To claim that Bluesky is decentralized or federated in its current form moves the goalposts of both of those terms, which I find unacceptable.

I suppose PDS instances are included: https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds

But....I came here just for the gloating fediverse content.

What else could there be?

I mean I agree... it's kind of the constant crux isn't it?

The IT nerds pick a protocol that's uncontrolled, you need to select options and servers, because... well obviously that's kind of the definition of uncontrolled.

Some big name with big VC backing makes a big platform, makes it simple as possible, no choices, no control but good defaults. Average joes all flock there, build huge communities, users happy. Obviously the bulk of the creative types, celebrities etc... that most people care about flock there.

Big corp or VCs start demanding more monetization, or political censorship, or whatever kind of enshittification they inevitably always will. Users complain, but it all continues to amplify... open communities announce "hey we've got our alternative here", they say "thanks but nah that's too complicated, and you don't have the users that I want to see anyway". People complain more... and either adapt and accept the enshitification as normal... or maybe another big VC backed individual or other corp opens an alternative and pulls off the impossible critical mass goal, and process repeats.

I don't really know the solution, just know the pattern. Bluesky is IMO the new twitter... fundimentally I don't see it as super different than the old twitter. Only way I really see everything working is if say... a corporate backed giant actually played nicely and allowed interoperability with a federated protocol that's actually... well hostable.

It's basically like exactly what happens out in the real world... walmart comes offers better convenience and lower prices than local competitors... local economy adapts to walmart, individual stores shut down... half of owners, etc... forced to working for walmart for garbage pay.