I've had a lot of people ask how BlueSky compares to Mastodon and the Fediverse. I've tried to make the answer as simple and easy to understand as possible:
🦋 BlueSky is designed to give corporations and wealthy people full control of the network. All of its traffic has to flow through expensive-to-run corporate relays.
The Fediverse is designed to give ordinary people control of the network. All of its traffic flows directly from one cheap-to-run server to another.
There is one key question I haven’t yet seen answered anywhere:
“[…] our proposed methodology here of networking through Relays instead of server-to-server isn’t prescriptive. The protocol is actually explicitly designed to work both ways.”
https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/federation-architecture
QUESTION: What would that look like? Would each PDS have to crawl all relevant PDSes (=very inefficient)?
Whether or not AT Protocol can be decentralized hinges on the answer.
As far as I know, in the real world AT protocol servers cannot federate without being connected to relays.
There is also only one relay at the moment.
True! But (and I’m saying that as someone who thinks the Fediverse is the better choice):
It *sounds* like the protocol was designed to support true federation (vs. “big world” design based on Relays). What would that look like?
If that works well then, in principle, AT *could* become a reasonable and open alternative to ActivityPub.
If not (which is my current impression but I may be wrong) then there is no way of that ever happening.
Fedi.Tips
Axel Rauschmayer
Ted Mielczarek