alt Hacker News> I mean, this literally already happened (a person was banned, and Blacksky reversed that ban on their app server).
Blacksky is literally the only such example of alternative infrastructure that I know of, and obviously, it will not be applicable to the vast majority of people. Given the rising cost of hosting combined with the fact that the compute needs of running appviews and relays should theoretically only go up, I have a strong feeling that there will not be a lot more of them, either. It's already bigger than ActivityPub I believe and we're in the very low single digits at best.
Meanwhile, if we really did get a lot of these instances, then it really begs the question what the actual benefit of Bluesky's ATProto architecture is: if someone is banned on Bluesky and not Blacksky... won't users see a totally different view of the world? Isn't that the same problem ActivityPub sees? How does this really differ from defederation in practice?
> What is a better solution you’d like to see? I think it’s reasonable that there’s a market between these and if there’s enough demand, another app server can become popular.
If I knew how to fix this, I would probably be trying to help rather than criticizing ATProto. I don't think it can be fixed, so I don't have any suggestions.
> I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect that the apps shouldn’t be in control of their own moderation.
It kind of sounds like you're admitting that there is no real difference from a user standpoint with browsing to twitter.com vs bsky.app that have anything to do with decentralization.
I know I'm not going to win a popularity contest here, you don't even have to bother responding, honestly. But just being honest, I know you're a pretty intelligent person and the work you have done has benefited my life as a developer. I have a feeling deep down you also realize there is an inherent contradiction with Bluesky and ATProto's marketing pitch. I wish you would be honest about it.
The Fediverse has value specifically because of its downsides. A version of decentralized social media without those downsides inherently picks up almost all of the disadvantages of centralized social media. To me it seems apparent that all you can do is move the sliders around a bit, and Bluesky appears to net a very tiny percent of benefit from decentralization while bearing immense cost for it.
Replies
> Blacksky is literally the only such example of alternative infrastructure that I know of
That doesn't mean other places aren't doing so. As an example - here's a list of all the relays that mirror the ATProto network: https://atproto.at/relays
There's 16 relays by my account, of varying sizes. Of course, you don't have to query a relay - you can look at the Personal Data Servers (PDSes) directly.
Speaking of - there are just over 3000 PDSes: https://blue.mackuba.eu/directory/pdses
Each of these PDSes hosts one or more accounts, and you can self-host your PDS to truly own your data up and down the stack.
There's also oodles of different applications, of which Bluesky is just one. There's:
* Germ (encrypted DMs, Signal competitor)
* Leaflet (blogs, Substack/Medium competitor)
* Semble (link collection/sharing)
* BeaconBits (location-based social media, like FourSquare)
* SkyReader (Google Reader)
* Keytrace (cryptographic identity proofs)
* Smoke Signal (social events)
* Teal.fm (Last.fm)
* Goals.garden (goal/habit tracking/accountability)
* Tangled (GitHub)
* Sifa (LinkedIn)
* BookHive (Goodreads)
* Streamplace (Twitch)
* Spark (Instagram)
* Grain (also Instagram)
* Popfeed (Trakt)
* And more, like the TikTok clone I can't remember the name of, some more blogging platforms, a (fairly dead) Hackernews clone, some games, etc.
That isn't even mentioning all the Bluesky clones like Blacksky, Eurosky, Northsky, and W.
Each of these shares the same account - the account on your PDS, which you can self-host on any computer with an internet connection. I run mine alongside my smarthome server. Because they share an account, they interop - I can subscribe to a blog on Leaflet and have it show up in my Bluesky feed.
These services can fetch data from your PDS directly, or they can look at the Relay and get the full view of the network - but frequently, they don't need to.
Bluesky went down a couple months ago and many of these services were all perfectly usable, because they used the protocol but not any infra provided by Bluesky itself. The people who couldn't access the network were the ones who relied on Bluesky to host their accounts - which is a majority of the network, sure, but in the same way that Mastodon.social is a good chunk of Mastodon's network. I was able to use Blacksky to post onto Bluesky while Bluesky was down, because I was self-hosted.
Now both Eurosky and W have launched; Eurosky is aiming to be fully independent this summer and I _think_ that W already is? W's a bit more closed-off than most of the other projects I named, going directly after Twitter-as-it-is-now and not Twitter-as-it-was (hence why they chose W to compete with X).
Yep. Effectively, there are a low single digit number of ATProto "instances" - they just pull posts from a more decentralized data layer than Fedi instances.
> It kind of sounds like you're admitting that there is no real difference from a user standpoint with browsing to twitter.com vs bsky.app that have anything to do with decentralization.
Bluesky users can interact with Blacksky users and vice versa unless Bluesky has applied moderation to the Blacksky user, because they are decentralized via ATproto. ~Twitter~ X users cannot interact with users on any other application, because X is not decentralized.