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vvpan 2 days ago [-]
I'll post this as a top level comment, because I think it is crucial: A few people are saying that it is expensive to run a relay but others have done it for as low as $34/month [1]. So unless somebody presents other proof that it is expensive I would say that those posters are either wrong and trying to mislead us on purpose.
Edit: actually the article links to somebody doing it for $18/month.
I've also done a full network replica (all the data indexed in a postgres) on a raspberry pi (with an 8tb nvme attached via a hat). Its really not expensive to do . And if I wanted to drop data older than say 3 months, it would be even cheaper still.
vvpan 2 days ago [-]
Case in point! This is an often mentioned statement on which the argument that "atproto is no decentralized" largely hinges. There are honest atproto digs out there but that is not one.
fc417fc802 1 days ago [-]
> There are honest atproto digs out there but that is not one.
Which one? The expense, or not being decentralized? The latter remains valid because the majority of the userbase chooses ("only" by default ofc) to coordinate through a single operator. Network effects mean that you either play by their rules or you aren't allowed in the garden.
It's good to learn that a full mirror is so cheap but I think the criticism still holds to the extent that it's a high enough price that unless something changes it will continue to discourage the network from ever becoming truly federated. Compare to activitypub where you can stand up a fully self sufficient node on more or less anything that's capable of networking. The obvious downside being that the network is more fragmented and often less reliable overall (ex nodes are regularly flaky or go missing entirely, no single unified view of the network, etc etc all the perfectly valid complaints about AP).
I think AP, AT, and nostr all get certain things right but all have major downsides baked into their designs. Note that I don't mean this comment to be negative, merely to respond to your remark that the dig in question is somehow invalid.
Are we decentralized yet? (arewedecentralizedyet.online)
492 points by Bogdanp 6 months ago | 283 comments
aorth 2 days ago [-]
How much was the 8TB NVMe?
whyrusleeping 1 days ago [-]
Cheaper than it is now! I think it was about $1100 at the time, definitely the most expensive part of the whole setup
23 hours ago [-]
konart 1 days ago [-]
$18 can be "expensive".
People live in different conditions, have different income and (even more crucial) different expenses.
Not to mention subjective need. I may be interested in a relay, but I don't really need one. So for me 18$ will be too much. 5$? Maybe. (This is about as much as I'm paying for Fastmail right now, for example).
croon 1 days ago [-]
The point isn't "literally everyone can run it", but to refute that "only Bluesky can run it and thus lock everyone in".
sellmesoap 21 hours ago [-]
I'll go halfers with you, any other takers? I feel like sharing infrastructure via small online co-ops can take the bite out of the cost. So much cheaper then the cost of being the product via meta/goog etc.
Crucially, the purpose of Blacksky is to provide a service for the (US) black community which has its own moderation decisions while being substantially interoperable.
(Remember, the reasons people use one social network rather than another are almost always social first and technical second, where the social functions are enabled or hindered by the technology)
illithid0 2 days ago [-]
That post isn't very clear about what specifically happened on BlueSky that made the author move, and I can't see the full thread he links without having a BlackSky account.
What moderation decisions were made regarding this "Link" user that were suspect, using the post author's word?
knowtheory 2 days ago [-]
There are a lot of misunderstandings about what Blacksky is assuming that it's a just a community fork of Bluesky.
The Blacksky team has a much broader vision for which they decided ATProto was the right architecture.
My perspective of that situation is Link was a fairly popular poster, and had a post that was a quote post of someone from the Bluesky team with an image of an assassinated figure and an alt text that couldve been perceived as a threat to the bluesky team.
I share this just to be helpful a tiny bit but theres likely a lot of context missing and different perspectives on this.
slopinthebag 2 days ago [-]
> Crucially, the purpose of Blacksky is to provide a service for the (US) black community which has its own moderation decisions while being substantially interoperable.
What are the differences between Bluesky and Blacksky? What does it mean to provide different services for the black community?
> The main Blacksky feed and platform are exclusively for Black people. Non-Black people cannot create accounts to post on Blacksky.
Fascinating
edit: before people take it the wrong way, I mean it's fascinating in that I've never seen these type of moderation policies before. I've seen plenty of communities about cultures (i.e. Ukrainian discord servers), but not around Race and not exclusionary to outsiders. I'm not making a moral judgement here.
OneDeuxTriSeiGo 2 days ago [-]
Yeah it's worth noting that blacksky provides accounts to non-black users but their posts don't get included in the blacksky feed. And non-blacksky PDS users who are confirmed black still are allowed to be included in the blacksky feed.
So it's multiple components really.
- The blacksky feed which is a curated feed and community built around the US black community on atproto.
- The blacksky client, appview, moderation team, and relay which provide the necessary infrastructure for blacksky to operate independent of the rest of the ecosystem if they need to and for them to tailor their experience to their community.
- The blacksky PDS which serves as a source of truth for data storage and auth for blacksky users that choose to use it.
And of course non-black users can use all of this infrastructure but if you aren't black and you want to host your account on a blacksky PDS you have to pay a small subscription/donation.
It's all for their community but they are more than willing to let other people use their infra as long as those people pay their fair share.
arrowsmith 2 days ago [-]
Not that I’m going to do it myself, but what’s to stop a non-black person from signing up? Do you verify people’s identities?
tptacek 2 days ago [-]
I assume it's mostly the same thing that keeps non-Catholics from taking communion at Catholic mass.
knowtheory 2 days ago [-]
Yes, as far as i know it's an honest self-report kind of thing.
julianlam 2 days ago [-]
tasteless wafers?
tptacek 22 hours ago [-]
In the sense that there's no upside to violating the norm, yeah, that too.
OneDeuxTriSeiGo 2 days ago [-]
Note that I'm not a blacksky member, just someone involved in the greater atproto space so my understanding of the process is likely not perfect.
But AFAIK the way blacksky operates is that they assume good faith when new users join. If it becomes obvious that you are not black then you will likely get reported or directly hit by moderation action and they will ask you to verify your identity at some level.
I think it's something along the lines of "send a photograph that would be non-trivial to fake". Not necessarily forcing you to dox yourself but requiring that you provide some level of evidence that's visibly resistant to AI/tampering. Now I have no idea the extent to which they do this to be entirely honest but I do know they don't mess around with people doing "digital blackface".
I'm not sure how well that moderation approach will scale at large but given they are a community that has carved out their own niche and not a corp just blindly driving to scale, I doubt they'll see the strain that the greater bluesky and atproto have experienced with moderation struggles at scale. And given all decisions around policy and moderation rules are decided by the Blacksky People's Assembly, as the community evolves participants can participate in governance and help craft the process if they are dissatisfied.
what 2 days ago [-]
What does it mean to be “obviously not black” in a digital context?
OneDeuxTriSeiGo 1 days ago [-]
i.e. it becomes clear you are using it as a sockpuppet account (some users have been caught trying to do this), outright saying you aren't black, etc.
Like if you aren't being a niche internet celebrity and aren't trying to play main character on the internet it's unlikely you'd get caught unless you were particularly stupid but that's also kinda part of the point. It's a community and people in that community know each other both online and IRL. It'd be pretty hard to be involved in the community without leaving behind an evidence trail of you blatantly lying about who you are.
IncreasePosts 2 days ago [-]
Go into the subreddit "blackpeopletwitter" and just open a bunch of threads and look for someone commenting "found the white guy", or something like that.
2 days ago [-]
erxam 2 days ago [-]
I don't exactly know either, but it's probably some sort of lax verification measure like a selfie.
Don't need extreme measures to keep bad actors out if you're able and willing to throw out anyone who obviously doesn't intend on playing nice.
1 days ago [-]
TacticalCoder 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
pfraze 2 days ago [-]
Black people seeking structural or infrastructural autonomy within the US to counteract their historic exclusion from power, production, and protection post-slave-trade is a fairly specific context which doesn't apply to white or asian folks. Also I don't think asian people would appreciate being called "yellow."
xg15 2 days ago [-]
I can understand it from their perspective, but still don't think it's a good development (same with other exclusionary "safe spaces" for other groups).
Or rather, I'd at least like to know what is the end game here. Have those groups effectively given up any hope of changing the country and mainstream society at large, so the new strategy is now retreating into gated communities while leaving the rest to the Trumps and Musks?
pfraze 2 days ago [-]
The way the protocol works, they're not isolated, and so they're not ceding ground to other groups. I suppose the closest analogy would be an email host, in that running your own email host wouldn't materially isolate your users but it would enable you to set policies for your own users.
epistasis 2 days ago [-]
What is an exclusionary safe space? I've never heard of or encountered such a thing. Or are you saying that safe spaces are necessarily exclusionary, because they are welcoming people that have reasons to feel unsafe other places?
It seems like a very confusing concept to just throw out there without explanation!
Kye 2 days ago [-]
It's not gated. I can still talk to people fully in the Blacksky stack and interact with their public posts.
The usual pattern is like that Alex Norris comic:
"you do not fit in here"
"okay we will make our own place"
"why are you excluding us"
"oh no"
Except here they can stay connected with the broader Atmosphere but engage on their own terms.
illithid0 2 days ago [-]
I might be missing something about the protocol, but when logged into BlueSky, I can't interact with BlackSky accounts at all. I specifically have to have an account there to even follow a BlackSky account.
I'm not as familiar with ATProto as ActivityPub, but following someone from another Mastodon instance, for example, is seamless as long as I'm logged in to the account I have on my home instance.
pfraze 2 days ago [-]
Can you describe what happens? That would be a pretty significant bug. Users are hosted all over the place and typically interact fine.
I can't comment, follow, like, or anything like that without getting the "Sign in or create your account to join the cookout!" popup. I wasn't trying to cause problems or get downvoted, this is just the the first non-BlueSky PDS I've ever come across and was curious to see the federation work.
pfraze 1 days ago [-]
Oh just look them up on the app you have an account with (I believe bluesky). @rude1.blacksky.team
illithid0 1 days ago [-]
Ah, okay, thank you. I was expecting it to work more like Mastodon in the sense that I can go to a different instance and interact with accounts seamlessly without having to bring them up in my own instance, but this is fine, too.
rubyn00bie 1 days ago [-]
I follow, and am followed by, folks who use Blacksky and interact with them regularly. I have had zero issue with this, at any point. As Paul (the CTO of Bluesky) said in a sibling comment this would be a very serious bug.
FWIW— I have also not heard anything even remotely close to this at all from anyone using either service.
komali2 2 days ago [-]
> I'd at least like to know what is the end game here. Have those groups effectively given up any hope of changing the country and mainstream society at large, so the new strategy is now retreating into gated communities
I noticed this occasional tendency in the west to analyze an action or behavior by hypothetically scaling it to way beyond the scope of the actual action or behavior, and I've been wondering if this is some kind of judicial application of Kantian thinking?
I'd push back on that and say, not everything has to be scaled. Not every behavior is an indictment of other behavior. People doing things isn't necessarily an argument that all people should do those same things. Nor is it an indication that those people only want to do those things that way - just because some black people want a reprieve from whatever their perception of day to day western life is, doesn't mean they've "given up" on making any changes to that society.
xg15 2 days ago [-]
It's part of a trend though. The tendency of "safe spaces" is several decades old by now.
You can still ask why someone would think that this is a good or necessary thing to do.
brendoelfrendo 2 days ago [-]
Is not the onus on the rest of society to examine why black people (or any marginalized group) would not feel safe without their own safe spaces?
alienthrowaway 1 days ago [-]
It's facetious when people question why BlackSky need to exist 40+ years after the "14 words" and in the age where White Christian Nationalism is completely mask-off.
HN often tolerates dog whistles about how school kids bussed from "the had part of town" are a net-negative, but BlackSky is suddenly the bad type of segregation? GTFOH.
2 days ago [-]
2 days ago [-]
orsorna 2 days ago [-]
It's difficult to describe how the US black community has uniquely suffered for centuries due to unique appeal of the mercantile class to the Catholic church about how it's actually okay to mistreat their human cargo and perform chattel slavery. Then, hundreds of years later the mercantile reason is forgotten, yet bigotry from it lays embedded in American society. And in other societies that took black people as slaves, to a lesser extent.
So a black segregated community does not sound very racist for these historical reasons. Not to say that desegregation in America has failed, but that there are infallible holdouts that wish to cling to a rotted out ideology that, again, its origins by its believers have largely forgotten.
Asian American communities are complicit, more or less unknowingly, to a lesser extent but only because they have aped to authority in America to achieve "whiteness".
The sad truth is that there is no community that prides itself on being white without parroting trickster mercantile talking points, of which again I remind that their origins are forgotten and they do not even know why they hate so fiercely.
So something like Blacksky is genuinely exciting in theory. Even though it will probably self select in a way that makes it inhospitable for new comers. Much like Bluesky...but, I'm describing a separate argument from historical bigotry, which I feel compelled to call out since its origins have--for the fourth time--been so forgotten.
komali2 2 days ago [-]
I've never heard about this mercantile Catholic church thing, can you expand on it?
minitech 2 days ago [-]
- “yellow” is a racist adjective for asians, “black” is not a racist adjective for black people
- there is no “white community” in the US to make the equivalent to “black community”
so you can’t really draw any useful conclusions from how string replacement on this sentence makes you feel
amazingamazing 2 days ago [-]
> - “yellow” is a racist adjective for asians, “black” is not a racist adjective for black people
the term black historically was used and originated in a racist manner.
well_ackshually 2 days ago [-]
If and when the asian community decides to reappropriate "yellow" as a way of self identification, then given a few decades, it will not be seen as racist anymore.
In the mean time, "yellow" is a racist adjective for asians, "black" is not a racist adjective for black people.
> In several Gallup measurements over the next three decades, including the most recent in 2019, the large majority of Black Americans have said the use of Black vs. African American doesn't matter to them.
amazingamazing 2 days ago [-]
Not caring is not acceptance. The term is literally racist both and origin. Unfortunately they were denied being called simply Americans due to historical reasons. African American is sadly also a misnomer given that there’s barely any connection to Africa for the people generally referred to as “black”.
Notice how everyone else is called by nationality or origin.
brendoelfrendo 2 days ago [-]
Black is absolutely accepted as an accepted adjective. Especially with the capital-b, Black is used to refer to the unique Black culture and heritage in the United States. Black history is one where people were taken from their nations or places of origin, transported to a foreign land, and put in bondage. As you say in your own comment, many black or African-American people (whichever label you prefer) have little connection to Africa; it wouldn't make sense to them to refer to them by nationality or origin, when Black culture is its own thing.
Don't get it twisted: I agree that the history of African-Americans in the US is one marred by slavery, segregation, racism, and the constant struggle to attain and retain equality. But out of that came something unique that many black people celebrate to this day.
bbeonx 2 days ago [-]
this is true, "black" has been used in racist ways, but it got rehabbed and reclaimed in the 60s and 70s.
but more to the point, it is not currently used in a racist manner by the vast majority of the US, and certainly does not carry the same connotations as "yellow", so not really comparable imo
2 days ago [-]
Angostura 2 days ago [-]
I suspect contemporary usage is most relevant here, no?
2 days ago [-]
packetlost 2 days ago [-]
There's not really a black community either, it's a demographic. There are many communities of black people, but we really need to stop equating demographics with communities (not just this case).
bbeonx 2 days ago [-]
"yellowsky" sounds racist because calling asians "yellow" is racist.
"whitesky" sounds racist because...well, i don't know if you're a big history buff but in the US white-people-only gatherings were always suuuuper racist.
what 2 days ago [-]
Any X-people only gathering is super some-sort-of-ist.
arrowsmith 2 days ago [-]
I don’t really care if some group that doesn’t include me wants to exercise their freedom of association — whatever, it’s a free internet, go do your thing — but my lord it’s amusing to see Bluesky keep purging itself via these endless purity spirals.
Some people really can’t stand their own company.
pfraze 2 days ago [-]
I actually don't think Blacksky reflects any kind of cultural purging cycle. Blacksky is extremely practical in its formation & purpose - not reactionary to any specific events on the network - and most of the bluesky/blacksky userbases are connected and socializing. There's no beef between the userbases.
2 days ago [-]
erxam 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
totetsu 1 days ago [-]
Censorship here is specifically moderation of discussion of political assassinations, and NSFW fetish art work? I think its good to have a space for people to do "shadow work", but also I'm terrified by the path that neo-facist idiology took from 4chan /pol -> gaming culture -> the white house.
pjc50 1 days ago [-]
> discussion of political assassinations
This is one of those things that gets categorized one way or the other depending on whether you're respectably right-wing enough. People have been selling firing range targets with their political enemies on, and even in a couple of cases using them in campaigns, for a long time. And now political assassination is official US state policy!
> the path that neo-fascist ideology took from 4chan /pol -> gaming culture -> the white house
Yes, although I think that shows how difficult it is to moderate against ideology which can be smuggled in through "reasonable concerns".
ddtaylor 1 days ago [-]
Reminds me of when a terrible person I don't agree with gets deplatformed. Historically freedom of speech has been defended by those usually icky things and silencing them often just makes them more powerful.
ChrisArchitect 2 days ago [-]
Some previous Blacksky discussion:
Blacksky grew to millions of users without spending a dollar
because black people didn't actually want to drink from those water fountains, did they throwaway290? consider using your real account to make such false claims
1 days ago [-]
semiquaver 1 days ago [-]
You’re not really a student of history, I see.
throwaway290 1 days ago [-]
this is logic not history. two sides are segregated, one of them imposed it on each. now think with your brain.
HotGarbage 2 days ago [-]
The "decentralization" of Bluesky is a joke.
Despite its faults ActivityPub is superior.
8cvor6j844qw_d6 2 days ago [-]
I lean the same way. I signed up with an alias and got instantly banned.
Their support also drops certain alias emails, so there's no way to appeal.
A "decentralized" network that locks you out for using basic email privacy tooling, with zero recourse, is centralized where it counts.
OneDeuxTriSeiGo 2 days ago [-]
That's just the bluesky PBLLC PDS that banned you or refused to register you.
You can create an account with any email address you want if you host your own PDS or you can find another PDS that someone else hosts that is willing to register you an account.
One participant's new account spam protection has nothing to do with the network at large being centralised
RobotToaster 2 days ago [-]
You're still reliant on the centralised bluesky BGS.
OneDeuxTriSeiGo 2 days ago [-]
Only if you choose to use bluesky PBLLC's relays and it's super trivial to not do that. Plus you can run your own relay super cheaply.
Side note: it hasn't been called BGS for a very long time. Nowadays they are just called relays and since sync 1.1 the cost for running a relay decreased by multiple orders of magnitude.
minitech 2 days ago [-]
Not that that isn’t a practical concern, but that’s not the level at which the network claims to be decentralized. Your account was banned by one participant in the hypothetical decentralized network.
8cvor6j844qw_d6 2 days ago [-]
Agreed, in theory all participants are equal and being banned by one participant shouldn't lock you out of a decentralized network.
In practice, the vast majority of handles (98.9% as of 2024) are under bsky.social [1]. Yes, alternative PDS providers exist, but if the default onboarding funnels everyone into one provider, and the average user doesn't even know what a PDS is, then decentralization is an implementation detail, not a user-facing reality.
The cool thing is you can host your own node with its own rules; you should host an anonymous server and you can set the rules.
habinero 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
pocksuppet 2 days ago [-]
ActivityPub is a terrible protocol. The protocol isn't what the specs are, and there's not even a consensus de-facto spec beyond "what Mastodon does". Atproto is a bit better.
Atproto is terrible at decentralization however, because of the model where data is stored decentrally, but accessed centrally, in big servers that need to be aware of all the data. In the ActivityPub model there isn't such a thing as "all the data" - you see what you see.
jauntywundrkind 2 days ago [-]
That's, like, your opinion, man.
I am proud of my data, in its many media-type/lexicon feeds (browse my PDS directly at https://pdsls.dev/at://did:plc:zjbq26wybii5ojoypkso2mso), and I want people to know. I put my data on my PDS because it's good data and I believe that people contributing their "data" (sharing the world as they see it) is a democratic / open society virtue that makes the world better.
When you can meaningfully index all the data on a rpi4, I think that's awesome. That makes a lot of people scared or mad, it evokes many of the things people don't like. But it also stems from only ever having seen or known that situation when the entire stack is under corporate control and when it's a mega-corp harvesting the data. From being in captivity. Not when it's one dude bad-example.com running a link indexer for the entire site on an rpi4, and you can too. We don't know what's that like: it's never been possible. https://constellation.microcosm.blue/
There are legit reasons to have Fear Uncertainty and Doubt about atproto, and you don't have to have fun online. You are free to fuck off to less connected less online spaces if that's your bag. But I grew up wanting to be online and i still want to be online, and no service has ever actually done that before, not like this. This is dozens of times better than the next best thing as a distributed connected online system that I can be online with and that gives me the most freedom to build and use interesting neat new mini apps and tools, to be online with.
To say that like it's a bad thing, is, to me, a joke. I acknowledge your values differ, and respect your decision, but it seems so weird to not want to have fun being online, to get better at it, to make more nodes on the noospheric graph, and to made more edges between them. That still feels like the right choice for me, and it's never been tried socially, and I think it has potential to let humanity keep improving in radical ways. In contrast, renouncing the connected feels like a bad dumb move. But enjoy!! GL;HF.
petcryptid 2 days ago [-]
I'm pretty sure the previous poster was not referring to the fact a PDS holds all of YOUR data -- mastodon servers do the very same thing.
I think they might've been referring to the fact that ATProto requires the existence of big, central relay/BGS servers, which are forced to index all the data of everyone on the network for the whole "social" aspect to work well.
That requirement makes hosting a complete, independent ATProto stack much more expensive and resource intensive than hosting an ActivityPub server, thus making ATProto harder to like, actually decentralize. (Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think currently the only independent, full-network relay is the corporate Bluesky one?)
To conflate having doubts about ATProto's design with "not liking fun" feels silly to me; it's a much less battle-tested design, doubts are warranted.
knowtheory 2 days ago [-]
This isn't accurate tho.
Neither Bluesky, nor other ATProto services require any of this.
RedDwarf is an example of an ATProto client that connects only with your PDS, uses Microcosm (https://www.microcosm.blue/ )'s aggregation index (they calculate aggregate counts for a variety of things with a couple of raspberry pis run off of a home fiber connection): https://reddwarf.app/
No big iron anywhere in the picture.
You give up the ability to search the network, but okay, that's already a feature that all Mastodon users sacrifice as well.
pocksuppet 23 hours ago [-]
Does it work well? It sounds like it relies on scraping all follow relations in a central place (Microcosm) and then scrapes those feeds to find who replied to you.
This submission is about BlackSky doing the whole stack themselves. There are other single node app-views. So, thanks for asking, with apologies, let me correct you: you are wrong.
There are lots and lots of full network relays. A couple that run a full network relay on a < $5/mo VPS . See my other comments in this thread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47302514
If all you want is like and replies (which is the biggest huge part of the app view responsibility), Constellation has done that, is open source, and can do a full network link indexing on a raspberry pi. And which runs public endpoints you can just use, that many apps rely on.
Atproto unlike Mastodon also faces these challenges that, if you tried to do them on Mastodon, would get you screamed at and banned from instances. Fediverse broadly doesn't want you to use "their" data. You can't write search tools. As a result, Mastodon doesn't need anywhere near the complexity, because these unofficial but vociferously enforced terms-of-service disallow thorough interconnection to begin with. Makes it technically much simpler to pull off! No one is allowed to get a full fire hose. No broad app views are allowed. Dunno if this is still true, but for the longest time you wouldn't get likes or comments from someone unless they were already followed by someone on your fedi, and it's a direct result of this deliberate explicit lack of interconnection.
Those constraints greatly reduce the difficulty of scaling Mastodon: technical scaling is not a problem if you socially don't allow scale. So distributed you can't even read it.
Doubt is allowed. But from my view, Mastodon world deserves the doubt. It has stood still, barely budged. I'd love to be wrong. But it seems dominated by the one software that is Mastodon, and it doesn't seem to have a universe of interesting connected neat social softwares sprouting up left and right. The software centralization is near to total, the protocol centralization even worse. As a result, there is little distinguishing interesting novel Mastodon technology happening. The one API is deeply rooted. ActivityPub is trying to find some way to get started breaking this mono-culture & enable innovation but that's just started.
Meanwhile a casual glance at Atproto shows hundreds of amazing apps and systems and clients springing up, from amazing empassioned developers. 2025 saw a massive amount of technical decentralziation. Npmx and Eurosky setting up sizable idependent public/public-ish PDS instances, and has shown people indeed moving their core identity off BlueSky servers at some kind of scale. I forgive you for not knowing how far things have come, and I forget myself how incredibly quickly it's come together. It's still 99.99% Bluesky concentrated hosting, but it is distributed, has independent services for the full network, there is credible exit (1000 moved to npmx hosting in the past ~3 weeks), and to me the most important thing: there is technical diversity & independent exploration. There are so many devs building amazing things. That feels so so so absent on Mastodon.
That's the checkbox at the end of the Fermi great filter of interest for online social systems for me: can we permissionlessly build interesting social systems & experiences with these social protocols, or will each system have to look like a cookie cutter copy of a single instance?
riffraff 1 days ago [-]
> But it seems dominated by the one software that is Mastodon, and it doesn't seem to have a universe of interesting connected neat social softwares sprouting up left and right.
There's quite a few activitypub software that plays nicely with mastodon, it seems to me. Like, Wordpress has an official activitypub plugin that allows likes, replys, following and all that. Lemmy, snac, pixelfed, bookwyrm, misskey, peertube, pleroma..
There's even work on distributed/custom recommendation going on.
I think it's fair to like either atproto or activitypub (I like both!), and bluesky certainly has momentum, but I don't think one can reasonably say the other side is not moving.
Kye 1 days ago [-]
The only significant motion I've seen in years in the AP space is Bridgy/A New Social and Wafrn. And while having investment and conferences isn't the only sign of life, it's notable that AP hasn't had once since the first in 2020 while AT is headed into its second building on all that started at the first.
It's neat that some websites communicate on AP, but every single one compounds the problems AT attempts to solve. You talk about software playing nice with Mastodon while AT is converging on standard lexicons and Cisco is investing in changing the nature of the relay for the better:
After everything that spawned at the first AtmosphereConf last year, I'm eager to see what happens after the one coming up. We got all this from stuff that started there, or was built on things started there.
afavour 2 days ago [-]
If you wish to avoid downvotes you might benefit from stating why you think ActivityPub’s decentralization is superior. We’re in a thread discussing an example of Bluesky decentralization so it’s clearly possible.
HotGarbage 2 days ago [-]
The amount of resources required to federate with Bluesky (i.e. ingest the entire firehose) is untenable.
There's no other network where anything like this is remotely even possible today, much less at such tiny costs! And it turns out it's actually computationally not hard to do so much stuff!
Imo a good time to remember the old chant: "the only war that matters is the war against imagination; all other wars are subsumed by this war." A lot of totally closed people around HN parts. Atproto is one of the new favs for the shallow hate-brigade (alongside systemd, Linux audio, k8s).
2 days ago [-]
mpalmer 2 days ago [-]
Bluesky's end user story is extremely solid. User-driven, first class moderation tooling, inside the protocol. Why do you think the difference in resources required between the two is decisive?
Your opinion sounds too strongly held to be defended this half-heartedly.
wolvoleo 2 days ago [-]
It's more the parts they didn't make federated that hold it back in this regard.
Maybe it's good for end users but that doesn't mean much if it can fall into the same enshittification trap as the others. Also, centralised moderation. I don't want to be dependent on an American company's moderation rules.
There was an article here recently about someone who really tried setting up their own including a did:web and they ran into many problems. https://notes.nora.codes/atproto-again/
There's still many little centralised ties in bluesky and I doubt they'll ever relinquish control completely.
Personally I like nostr a lot more, it seems to be more censorship-resistant and really decentralised.
AlienRobot 2 days ago [-]
It was not designed so anyone could run their own social media for $5. It simply has a fundamentally different design that tries to solve different problems.
No need to call it a "joke." Both solutions can co-exist on vastness of the Internet.
Edit: actually the article links to somebody doing it for $18/month.
[1] https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lo7a2a4qxg2l
Which one? The expense, or not being decentralized? The latter remains valid because the majority of the userbase chooses ("only" by default ofc) to coordinate through a single operator. Network effects mean that you either play by their rules or you aren't allowed in the garden.
It's good to learn that a full mirror is so cheap but I think the criticism still holds to the extent that it's a high enough price that unless something changes it will continue to discourage the network from ever becoming truly federated. Compare to activitypub where you can stand up a fully self sufficient node on more or less anything that's capable of networking. The obvious downside being that the network is more fragmented and often less reliable overall (ex nodes are regularly flaky or go missing entirely, no single unified view of the network, etc etc all the perfectly valid complaints about AP).
I think AP, AT, and nostr all get certain things right but all have major downsides baked into their designs. Note that I don't mean this comment to be negative, merely to respond to your remark that the dig in question is somehow invalid.
Are we decentralized yet? (arewedecentralizedyet.online)
492 points by Bogdanp 6 months ago | 283 comments
People live in different conditions, have different income and (even more crucial) different expenses.
Not to mention subjective need. I may be interested in a relay, but I don't really need one. So for me 18$ will be too much. 5$? Maybe. (This is about as much as I'm paying for Fastmail right now, for example).
Crucially, the purpose of Blacksky is to provide a service for the (US) black community which has its own moderation decisions while being substantially interoperable.
(Remember, the reasons people use one social network rather than another are almost always social first and technical second, where the social functions are enabled or hindered by the technology)
What moderation decisions were made regarding this "Link" user that were suspect, using the post author's word?
The Blacksky team has a much broader vision for which they decided ATProto was the right architecture.
There's a lot more to read about them up on their site: https://blackskyweb.xyz/
Some commentary ( https://bsky.app/profile/mackuba.eu/post/3m2jtzlznu22o ).
IIRC it came during a week of discourse & tensions around bluesky moderation concerning some controversial writers ( https://bsky.app/profile/jay.bsky.team/post/3m25esnq4t22y )
I share this just to be helpful a tiny bit but theres likely a lot of context missing and different perspectives on this.
What are the differences between Bluesky and Blacksky? What does it mean to provide different services for the black community?
Fascinating
edit: before people take it the wrong way, I mean it's fascinating in that I've never seen these type of moderation policies before. I've seen plenty of communities about cultures (i.e. Ukrainian discord servers), but not around Race and not exclusionary to outsiders. I'm not making a moral judgement here.
So it's multiple components really.
- The blacksky feed which is a curated feed and community built around the US black community on atproto.
- The blacksky client, appview, moderation team, and relay which provide the necessary infrastructure for blacksky to operate independent of the rest of the ecosystem if they need to and for them to tailor their experience to their community.
- The blacksky PDS which serves as a source of truth for data storage and auth for blacksky users that choose to use it.
And of course non-black users can use all of this infrastructure but if you aren't black and you want to host your account on a blacksky PDS you have to pay a small subscription/donation.
It's all for their community but they are more than willing to let other people use their infra as long as those people pay their fair share.
But AFAIK the way blacksky operates is that they assume good faith when new users join. If it becomes obvious that you are not black then you will likely get reported or directly hit by moderation action and they will ask you to verify your identity at some level.
I think it's something along the lines of "send a photograph that would be non-trivial to fake". Not necessarily forcing you to dox yourself but requiring that you provide some level of evidence that's visibly resistant to AI/tampering. Now I have no idea the extent to which they do this to be entirely honest but I do know they don't mess around with people doing "digital blackface".
I'm not sure how well that moderation approach will scale at large but given they are a community that has carved out their own niche and not a corp just blindly driving to scale, I doubt they'll see the strain that the greater bluesky and atproto have experienced with moderation struggles at scale. And given all decisions around policy and moderation rules are decided by the Blacksky People's Assembly, as the community evolves participants can participate in governance and help craft the process if they are dissatisfied.
Like if you aren't being a niche internet celebrity and aren't trying to play main character on the internet it's unlikely you'd get caught unless you were particularly stupid but that's also kinda part of the point. It's a community and people in that community know each other both online and IRL. It'd be pretty hard to be involved in the community without leaving behind an evidence trail of you blatantly lying about who you are.
Don't need extreme measures to keep bad actors out if you're able and willing to throw out anyone who obviously doesn't intend on playing nice.
Or rather, I'd at least like to know what is the end game here. Have those groups effectively given up any hope of changing the country and mainstream society at large, so the new strategy is now retreating into gated communities while leaving the rest to the Trumps and Musks?
It seems like a very confusing concept to just throw out there without explanation!
The usual pattern is like that Alex Norris comic:
"you do not fit in here"
"okay we will make our own place"
"why are you excluding us"
"oh no"
Except here they can stay connected with the broader Atmosphere but engage on their own terms.
I'm not as familiar with ATProto as ActivityPub, but following someone from another Mastodon instance, for example, is seamless as long as I'm logged in to the account I have on my home instance.
I can't comment, follow, like, or anything like that without getting the "Sign in or create your account to join the cookout!" popup. I wasn't trying to cause problems or get downvoted, this is just the the first non-BlueSky PDS I've ever come across and was curious to see the federation work.
FWIW— I have also not heard anything even remotely close to this at all from anyone using either service.
I noticed this occasional tendency in the west to analyze an action or behavior by hypothetically scaling it to way beyond the scope of the actual action or behavior, and I've been wondering if this is some kind of judicial application of Kantian thinking?
I'd push back on that and say, not everything has to be scaled. Not every behavior is an indictment of other behavior. People doing things isn't necessarily an argument that all people should do those same things. Nor is it an indication that those people only want to do those things that way - just because some black people want a reprieve from whatever their perception of day to day western life is, doesn't mean they've "given up" on making any changes to that society.
You can still ask why someone would think that this is a good or necessary thing to do.
HN often tolerates dog whistles about how school kids bussed from "the had part of town" are a net-negative, but BlackSky is suddenly the bad type of segregation? GTFOH.
So a black segregated community does not sound very racist for these historical reasons. Not to say that desegregation in America has failed, but that there are infallible holdouts that wish to cling to a rotted out ideology that, again, its origins by its believers have largely forgotten.
Asian American communities are complicit, more or less unknowingly, to a lesser extent but only because they have aped to authority in America to achieve "whiteness".
The sad truth is that there is no community that prides itself on being white without parroting trickster mercantile talking points, of which again I remind that their origins are forgotten and they do not even know why they hate so fiercely.
So something like Blacksky is genuinely exciting in theory. Even though it will probably self select in a way that makes it inhospitable for new comers. Much like Bluesky...but, I'm describing a separate argument from historical bigotry, which I feel compelled to call out since its origins have--for the fourth time--been so forgotten.
- there is no “white community” in the US to make the equivalent to “black community”
so you can’t really draw any useful conclusions from how string replacement on this sentence makes you feel
the term black historically was used and originated in a racist manner.
In the mean time, "yellow" is a racist adjective for asians, "black" is not a racist adjective for black people.
Notice how everyone else is called by nationality or origin.
Don't get it twisted: I agree that the history of African-Americans in the US is one marred by slavery, segregation, racism, and the constant struggle to attain and retain equality. But out of that came something unique that many black people celebrate to this day.
but more to the point, it is not currently used in a racist manner by the vast majority of the US, and certainly does not carry the same connotations as "yellow", so not really comparable imo
"whitesky" sounds racist because...well, i don't know if you're a big history buff but in the US white-people-only gatherings were always suuuuper racist.
Some people really can’t stand their own company.
This is one of those things that gets categorized one way or the other depending on whether you're respectably right-wing enough. People have been selling firing range targets with their political enemies on, and even in a couple of cases using them in campaigns, for a long time. And now political assassination is official US state policy!
> the path that neo-fascist ideology took from 4chan /pol -> gaming culture -> the white house
Yes, although I think that shows how difficult it is to moderate against ideology which can be smuggled in through "reasonable concerns".
Blacksky grew to millions of users without spending a dollar
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45018773
Despite its faults ActivityPub is superior.
Their support also drops certain alias emails, so there's no way to appeal.
A "decentralized" network that locks you out for using basic email privacy tooling, with zero recourse, is centralized where it counts.
You can create an account with any email address you want if you host your own PDS or you can find another PDS that someone else hosts that is willing to register you an account.
One participant's new account spam protection has nothing to do with the network at large being centralised
Side note: it hasn't been called BGS for a very long time. Nowadays they are just called relays and since sync 1.1 the cost for running a relay decreased by multiple orders of magnitude.
In practice, the vast majority of handles (98.9% as of 2024) are under bsky.social [1]. Yes, alternative PDS providers exist, but if the default onboarding funnels everyone into one provider, and the average user doesn't even know what a PDS is, then decentralization is an implementation detail, not a user-facing reality.
[1]: https://arxiv.org/html/2408.12449
Atproto is terrible at decentralization however, because of the model where data is stored decentrally, but accessed centrally, in big servers that need to be aware of all the data. In the ActivityPub model there isn't such a thing as "all the data" - you see what you see.
I am proud of my data, in its many media-type/lexicon feeds (browse my PDS directly at https://pdsls.dev/at://did:plc:zjbq26wybii5ojoypkso2mso), and I want people to know. I put my data on my PDS because it's good data and I believe that people contributing their "data" (sharing the world as they see it) is a democratic / open society virtue that makes the world better.
When you can meaningfully index all the data on a rpi4, I think that's awesome. That makes a lot of people scared or mad, it evokes many of the things people don't like. But it also stems from only ever having seen or known that situation when the entire stack is under corporate control and when it's a mega-corp harvesting the data. From being in captivity. Not when it's one dude bad-example.com running a link indexer for the entire site on an rpi4, and you can too. We don't know what's that like: it's never been possible. https://constellation.microcosm.blue/
There are legit reasons to have Fear Uncertainty and Doubt about atproto, and you don't have to have fun online. You are free to fuck off to less connected less online spaces if that's your bag. But I grew up wanting to be online and i still want to be online, and no service has ever actually done that before, not like this. This is dozens of times better than the next best thing as a distributed connected online system that I can be online with and that gives me the most freedom to build and use interesting neat new mini apps and tools, to be online with.
To say that like it's a bad thing, is, to me, a joke. I acknowledge your values differ, and respect your decision, but it seems so weird to not want to have fun being online, to get better at it, to make more nodes on the noospheric graph, and to made more edges between them. That still feels like the right choice for me, and it's never been tried socially, and I think it has potential to let humanity keep improving in radical ways. In contrast, renouncing the connected feels like a bad dumb move. But enjoy!! GL;HF.
I think they might've been referring to the fact that ATProto requires the existence of big, central relay/BGS servers, which are forced to index all the data of everyone on the network for the whole "social" aspect to work well.
That requirement makes hosting a complete, independent ATProto stack much more expensive and resource intensive than hosting an ActivityPub server, thus making ATProto harder to like, actually decentralize. (Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think currently the only independent, full-network relay is the corporate Bluesky one?)
To conflate having doubts about ATProto's design with "not liking fun" feels silly to me; it's a much less battle-tested design, doubts are warranted.
Neither Bluesky, nor other ATProto services require any of this.
RedDwarf is an example of an ATProto client that connects only with your PDS, uses Microcosm (https://www.microcosm.blue/ )'s aggregation index (they calculate aggregate counts for a variety of things with a couple of raspberry pis run off of a home fiber connection): https://reddwarf.app/
No big iron anywhere in the picture.
You give up the ability to search the network, but okay, that's already a feature that all Mastodon users sacrifice as well.
There are lots and lots of full network relays. A couple that run a full network relay on a < $5/mo VPS . See my other comments in this thread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47302514
If all you want is like and replies (which is the biggest huge part of the app view responsibility), Constellation has done that, is open source, and can do a full network link indexing on a raspberry pi. And which runs public endpoints you can just use, that many apps rely on.
Atproto unlike Mastodon also faces these challenges that, if you tried to do them on Mastodon, would get you screamed at and banned from instances. Fediverse broadly doesn't want you to use "their" data. You can't write search tools. As a result, Mastodon doesn't need anywhere near the complexity, because these unofficial but vociferously enforced terms-of-service disallow thorough interconnection to begin with. Makes it technically much simpler to pull off! No one is allowed to get a full fire hose. No broad app views are allowed. Dunno if this is still true, but for the longest time you wouldn't get likes or comments from someone unless they were already followed by someone on your fedi, and it's a direct result of this deliberate explicit lack of interconnection.
Those constraints greatly reduce the difficulty of scaling Mastodon: technical scaling is not a problem if you socially don't allow scale. So distributed you can't even read it.
Doubt is allowed. But from my view, Mastodon world deserves the doubt. It has stood still, barely budged. I'd love to be wrong. But it seems dominated by the one software that is Mastodon, and it doesn't seem to have a universe of interesting connected neat social softwares sprouting up left and right. The software centralization is near to total, the protocol centralization even worse. As a result, there is little distinguishing interesting novel Mastodon technology happening. The one API is deeply rooted. ActivityPub is trying to find some way to get started breaking this mono-culture & enable innovation but that's just started.
Meanwhile a casual glance at Atproto shows hundreds of amazing apps and systems and clients springing up, from amazing empassioned developers. 2025 saw a massive amount of technical decentralziation. Npmx and Eurosky setting up sizable idependent public/public-ish PDS instances, and has shown people indeed moving their core identity off BlueSky servers at some kind of scale. I forgive you for not knowing how far things have come, and I forget myself how incredibly quickly it's come together. It's still 99.99% Bluesky concentrated hosting, but it is distributed, has independent services for the full network, there is credible exit (1000 moved to npmx hosting in the past ~3 weeks), and to me the most important thing: there is technical diversity & independent exploration. There are so many devs building amazing things. That feels so so so absent on Mastodon.
That's the checkbox at the end of the Fermi great filter of interest for online social systems for me: can we permissionlessly build interesting social systems & experiences with these social protocols, or will each system have to look like a cookie cutter copy of a single instance?
There's quite a few activitypub software that plays nicely with mastodon, it seems to me. Like, Wordpress has an official activitypub plugin that allows likes, replys, following and all that. Lemmy, snac, pixelfed, bookwyrm, misskey, peertube, pleroma..
There's even work on distributed/custom recommendation going on.
I think it's fair to like either atproto or activitypub (I like both!), and bluesky certainly has momentum, but I don't think one can reasonably say the other side is not moving.
It's neat that some websites communicate on AP, but every single one compounds the problems AT attempts to solve. You talk about software playing nice with Mastodon while AT is converging on standard lexicons and Cisco is investing in changing the nature of the relay for the better:
https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-nandakumar-atproto-ato...
https://bsky.app/profile/ipv.sx/post/3mg4h4tncmk2l
There's no other network where anything like this is remotely even possible today, much less at such tiny costs! And it turns out it's actually computationally not hard to do so much stuff!
I ran into this really great thread from Henry Farrell on people who overly polarized themselves, who shut down being willing to hear anything else. https://bsky.app/profile/himself.bsky.social/post/3mgagtkjg7...
Imo a good time to remember the old chant: "the only war that matters is the war against imagination; all other wars are subsumed by this war." A lot of totally closed people around HN parts. Atproto is one of the new favs for the shallow hate-brigade (alongside systemd, Linux audio, k8s).
Your opinion sounds too strongly held to be defended this half-heartedly.
Maybe it's good for end users but that doesn't mean much if it can fall into the same enshittification trap as the others. Also, centralised moderation. I don't want to be dependent on an American company's moderation rules.
There was an article here recently about someone who really tried setting up their own including a did:web and they ran into many problems. https://notes.nora.codes/atproto-again/
There's still many little centralised ties in bluesky and I doubt they'll ever relinquish control completely.
Personally I like nostr a lot more, it seems to be more censorship-resistant and really decentralised.
No need to call it a "joke." Both solutions can co-exist on vastness of the Internet.