this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2024
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Not an expert, I only have impressions …
The main difference is their architecture which is to some extent presumed by their protocol or at least designed to work with it. The architecture is more pyramidal while the fediverse is more flat/spherical. That is, ATProto will have big centralised servers receiving and sending out basically all the data, with everything else like the platform (like bsky, mastodon, lemmy) and feeds (like communities) and moderators (kinda like communities too?) processing and filtering this data stream for as it sees fit. Across these platforms, feeds etc, you’re able to move around with a single account and pick and shoes what you use. As you move further down stream from the big central server, the app you make becomes more simple to make (like the feeds in BlueSky now).
The idea being that individual instances aren’t so central to the system, which I think is a good thing. Users are more free in their system to move around without new accounts and losing or breaking the connections they’ve made. Also makes sense to me.
The big alarming aspect is the primacy of the big central server. They’ve said that multiple can exist but that it’ll be like search engines, only a few will bother to put in the effort.
By comparison, the fediverse is flat … a bunch of independent instances communicating with each other as they see fit. That’s basically it. Each user is bound to and stuck on their instance, which means when defederation happens it can be quite dramatic for the simple and obvious reason that all the users of an instance aren’t the same or hold the same values.
Frankly, it’s a system designed to create drama, while, IMO, mostly failing at its purported purpose, which is to foster communities. Because, first, you need software platforms to facilitate, and most on the fediverse suck at it (where are instances specific private chat rooms of any sort on the fediverse), and second, communities grow organically which is actually impeded by being stuck on an instance.
The latter is why we have federation in the first place … organic community building … which apart from basic moderation needs really calls into question whether the whole instances thing has much value apart from being the obvious Web 2.0 circa 2012 way of doing decentralisation. Taking the tight coupling between user, instance, platform, moderation (and allegedly community) but instead allowing these to be modular and composable with the user in the driving seat all sound like good ideas to me.
I personally hope ATProto mostly delivers on the promises of their system so that this whole idea of a decentralised social internet can move forward.
I'm personally not convinced bluesky will ever be truly decentralised.
I suspect the reason they have delayed implementing federation for so long is to get as many users on their centralised service, and the big central server will be used to impose their choice of censorship. Even if you can theoretically run your own master server, if 99.9% of users only use bluesky's it's meaningless.
I do agree that defederation is the biggest issue holding the fediverse model back, however. It makes choosing a server overly complex.
Not a bad take on BlueSky. The other funny side of it is that many of the users there don’t want any federation to happen at all.
It’s not unreasonable though that they have wanted to make sure their system of federation etc works well before they open it up, and that that has taken some time. By all accounts they have a small team and are generally making slow progress, and if they see themselves as competing with Twitter, they probably think it needs to work well straight out of the gate.
Yeah it must take a ton of work to make function properly but at the same time, I also think it isn’t unreasonable to doubt that a for-profit entity is ever going to willingly open up their system.
Why wouldn’t they just keep coming up with excuses for why it hasn’t been implemented yet? There is no real genuine promise here like there would be if the federation system was implemented from the start (even if it was janky) and every day that goes by the likelihood that federation/decentralization will ever happen on Bluesky becomes less and less likely.
This reminds me of an early access game selling itself on a vision of what the game will become while clearly having very little intention of ever getting there. They spend a lot of time talking about all the great features they will add like NPCs and quests but are they actually ever going to tackle the tough problems of implementing those features? Or are they just going to focus on selling character and weapon skins through loot boxes?
All good points.
Bluesky isn't decentralized though if your description above is correct
So, again, I’ve got an impressionistic understanding.
The big central server, AFAIU, can be decentralised. How multiple such servers share data with each other, I don’t know. But, AFAIU, policy choices can be made at the level of the big central servers about what content or users they allow etc. But the idea is that moderation decisions will be made by downstream services. And the expectation of course is that the cost of running such a server would be prohibitively onerous except for a few instances. So it’d be a soft form, oligopoly like, of decentralisation you might say, if anyone actually makes one (currently there’s only the BlueSky big central server). It’s an interesting question though how small a community would be necessary to collect the wherewithal to start a new one.
Otherwise, the idea, AFAICT, is that it’s just a service and not intended to affect content and users much, which is instead up to all the downstream services which are intended to make up the actual user experience. The idea is that these layers will be open and decentralised. AFAIU, BlueSky is technically already decentralised now, under the hood, as to test things they’ve split the platform over multiple instances. I’m pretty sure their equivalent of an instance is something anyone can run (where BlueSky the app is open source). So it’s some form of decentralisation I suppose. I haven’t seen any breakdown though as to what community building facilities, tools and powers are available from the system. That’d be interesting, especially in comparison to the fediverse. I've seen it predicted that as BlueSky opens up there'll be a migration of some sort to the fediverse as vulnerable users begin to suffer from abuse that the fediverse offers more protection from. But BlueSky is also a moving target.
I suspect the big eagle eye perspective is that the fediverse leans more "balkanised and independent servers" and BlueSky (or at least the promise/idea of bluesky) leans more "distributed public square". In the push away from mega social media platforms, I think there's probably a need for both to exist, at least in the interim as this whole "transition", which is likely more lengthy and chaotic than many would like, pans out.
In the end though, bluesky feels like a more fragile project. They're a bit "late to the game", clearly have only a small team working on it, without a particularly compelling platform, and a little like the fediverse, have a slowly/slightly slipping away user base at the moment. There's a real chance we won't be talking about it in 2 years time. It could also do really well and suck the oxygen out of the fediverse in the same time TBH. In reality ... this whole thing may just take a while to shake out.