alt Hacker NewsI'm being a bit cheeky in the article's tone but I am fairly confident from discussions in the past that "But where are Bluesky instances?" is a common question which usually demonstrates a misunderstanding of the architecture where "having instances of an app" is seen as a measure of decentralization.
My article was an attempt to dig at this specific misunderstanding by comparing it to "But where are Google Reader instances?" which I think illustrates its absurdity. I genuinely do think that the two pictures I provide close to the end clear this up in a way a lot of early atproto/ActivityPub discussions completely gloss over.
Re: Relays, I wrote here on why I didn't include them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48600963. They're kind of incidental perf optimizations rather than essential to the model. In the post, I wanted to focus on the model.
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Thanks for the fair response, I agree you're being cheeky. Sorry, I'm being lazy not searching here, but have you written anything on if instances of something is a good measure of decentralisation? (FWIW, I feel independently owned/managed instances in the traditional non-mastodon-definition seems like an okay measure of decentralisation.)
I completely agree with the point in your link that relays are different to instances - I love architectures involving dumb-relay or zero-trust type nodes. But I think Relays should still be mentioned in your post, since they're probably the main architectural element which protect PDS instances from the scale issues heavily federated AP instances might face, right? (I only have a high level understanding of ATProto and very little experience with AP, happy to be told I just need to learn more for this to make sense.)
It's a comparison they are directly inviting, by constantly claiming it's decentralized. And then its defenders get upset when people rightfully point out that there is only a single instance, because that single instance going down takes the whole thing down. Like in Google Reader.
"but where are the instances?" is asking "if Bluesky the company disappeared or turned evil, would there be a Bluesky network that kept going?".
From my perspective, I care about the centralization/decentralization aspect a lot, and if I'm coming into the discussion with a much better understanding of the Mastodon side then _of course_ I'm going to ask about the instances--that's the vocabulary I'm going to use to try to probe for flaws and gaps. It's not necessarily that it's the instances specifically I care about, or that I'm somehow technically misguided.
What I hoped to read in the article is how we approach topics like centralization, censorship, moderation, data ownership--and with a technical lens. But I feel like all I got was "here's why instances are the wrong vocabulary" without substantively talking about the part I personally care about and want to marry the technical understanding with. Maybe I just read too shallowly and need to sit with it.