@[email protected]

That's a deflection again. Nobody doubts that technically both #activitypub and #atproto support decentralization.

But the point is that *in practice* basically all #bluesky users are concentrated on infrastructure of a single company under US jurisdiction, while #mastodon users are distributed over many servers in many jurisdictions all over the world.

The consequences can be seen with Mississippi.

https://mastodon.social/@ikuturso/115124768664434731

https://mastodon.social/@mastodonmigra[email protected]/115125132980066617

@folkerschamel @mmasnick.bsky.social

The technique Mike Masnick employs is to ignore the substance of the critique. #Bluesky may technically be capable of decentralization, but in practice it is still highly centralized. Instead, he repeats the mantra there are some examples of decentralization.

Stipulated Mike.

Now move on to addressing the reality that for all intents and purposes, which is what matters for these censorship issues, it is centralized.

https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/

@mmasnick @folkerschamel @mmasnick.bsky.social

This is a specious argument, and does not deserve a serious response. Please stop misrepresenting the current degree of centralized concentration of Bluesky PBC on AT Protocol. You are in a perfect position to advocate for actual meaningful decentralization, but instead continue to misrepresent the current overwhelming dominance of Bluesky PBC.

1/

@mmasnick @folkerschamel @mmasnick.bsky.social

Rather than making false and misleading arguments you could instead stipulate that the overwhelming dominance Bluesky PBC does currently make AT Protocol a defacto centralized network, but the company recognizes this and are taking specific steps to address it. AT Protocol is designed to facilitate decentralization and list what steps are being taken, against what metrics to achieve real decentralization.

2/

@mmasnick @folkerschamel @mmasnick.bsky.social

Specifically, what is the company doing to enable independent instances and provide the type of choice your marketing ballyhoos? What are your goals for achieving a meaningful percentage of the AT Protocol network users NOT being Bluesky PBC users? What programs are you sponsoring to achieve these ends? Are you serious about these goals?

3/

@mastodonmigration @folkerschamel @[email protected] the only one misrepresenting stuff is you, unfortunately. Bluesky has done a ton of stuff to enable actual decentralization, all of which we're starting to see come into effect as we speak and all you guys do is lie about it.

But you still ignore my point. If we (properly) counted Threads as part of the fediverse, would that make the fediverse less decentralized?

Answer please.

@mmasnick @folkerschamel @mmasnick.bsky.social

@mmasnick

@ricci did answer your question very specifically here:

https://discuss.systems/@ricci/115171236116610436

There was also more in depth discussion of the issue. It may be that you are not seeing the entire thread across the bridge.

@mastodonmigration @folkerschamel @[email protected] @ricci No @ricci is making a different (totally valid!) point. I am saying IF he included Threads, would you then say that Mastodon is less decentralized?

That's the only question I am asking. If your answer is yes, I would be confused. If your answer is no, you are admitting that this is not a measure of decentralization.

Which is it?

@mmasnick @mastodonmigration @folkerschamel @mmasnick.bsky.social I think a better question here, Mike is *if* Threads had 400M users who were active on the fediverse, would the fediverse be more centralized?

I would say yes.

@ricci @mmasnick @mastodonmigration @[email protected]

But even if all of #threads would be part of the #fediverse and make the fediverse practically centralized, it wouldn't change the the factual situation that
a) #mastodon is #decentralized,
b) #bluesky as being controlled by a single company is completely centralized, and
c) #atmosphere as being dominated by #bluesky is practically centralized.

@folkerschamel @mmasnick @mastodonmigration @mmasnick.bsky.social

Centralization is not binary the way you're presenting it here.

Let's say we have a 400M-user Threads and a 1M-user Mastodon. If they defederate or Threads dies, Mastodon users loose access to 99.8% of the people they could communicate with. Ouch. But Mastodonians still have 1M people in their network so maybe it'll survive. Definitely not certain, though, that's a big cut. That's why I say a version of the Fediverse with 400M actual federated Threads users would be quite centralized.

Now, people on one side may not actually give a shit about communicating with people on the other side. Fine, the people in both networks are not gaining a lot from federation. This seems to be more or less the status of most of the Fediverse and Threads, and why I think the correct thing to do is count the number of Threads users who have actually turned on federation, not the rest of them. If they defederate (as a lot of the Fediverse has done already), not a lot of connections are cut. This is why the existence of Threads does not increase the centralization the Fediverse today. This could, of course, change. This is why one should *keep* counting the number of Threads users who federate.

Now, let's do this for Bluesky and Blacksky (in its role as a PDS, appview, and maybe soon relay). If, today, they split (say, the Bluesky relay stops talking to the Blacksky PDS and appview) or Bluesky dies, the 718 people on the BlackSky PDS lose access to the 38M people on the Bluesky PDSes: 99.999% of the people in the network. Again, maybe people on Blacksky could care less about people on Bluesky. But, given the even vaster difference in size, I'd wager that Blacksky users are pretty strongly interconnected with Bluesky users. And again, maybe this changes; in the week I've been watching, the number of users on the Blacksky PDS has gone up by about 200. Maybe it continues to grow and gets a lot bigger, that would change the dynamic. So again, this is why it's worth measuring and watching.

@ricci @folkerschamel @mmasnick @mmasnick.bsky.social

Exactly. Let's keep in mind that one of the big reasons why decentralization matters is the 'fork off' test that Bluesky CEO Jay Graber memorialized in her 'No Caesars' marketing blitz. Simply stated, what is the impact on the overall network should any one node be lost, become evil or otherwise corrupted? Any analytic should inform this risk assessment as this one seems to do very well.

@mastodonmigration @folkerschamel @mmasnick @mmasnick.bsky.social

In fact, I have a proposal for a metric that attempts to measure this exactly. I'm calling it the B-Index (B for Block) but maybe I should call it C-Index for Caesar.

@mastodonmigration @folkerschamel @mmasnick @mmasnick.bsky.social now with actual link:

https://codeberg.org/ricci/are-we-decentralized-yet/src/branch/main/BIndex.md