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danpalmer • yesterday at 11:10 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

Bluesky has been asymptotically approaching full decentralisation. A few years ago the gap was everything except a decentralised design, then it was AppViews, now it's "tooling and documentation" for the bit of the PKI that only 50 entities have done.

Meanwhile I lost my Mastodon account history because I moved once, couldn't interact with half the network or apps because I was on a non-Mastodon codebase instance, lost my account again because I stopped paying for access to the instance I was on, all classic signs of centralisation.

Replies

bramhaag • yesterday at 11:29 PM

  > all classic signs of centralisation.
No, these are classic signs of decentralization.

  >  I lost my Mastodon account history because I moved once
Your posts still exist on every server that federated with you, there's just no central authority to coordinate reclaiming them.

  > couldn't interact with half the network or apps because I was on a non-Mastodon codebase instance
Independent implementations having compatibility issues is what happens when there's no central authority enforcing conformance. Frustrating, yes, but it's a symptom of decentralization.

  > lost my account again because I stopped paying for access to the instance I was on
That's just how paying for services works. You could host your own instance, and nobody but yourself can revoke your access.

On Mastodon, if something goes wrong, nobody can cut you off the network entirely. On Bluesky, the author deleted an empty test account and is now blacklisted network-wide until Bluesky support decides to help. That is a classic sign of centralization.

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direwolf20 • yesterday at 11:50 PM

I honestly can't tell if this comment is trolling.

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