Roni Rolle LaukkarinenJan 16

About Bluesky and federation:
Edit: There might be some mistakes, and my information could be outdated, but the point still stands - Bluesky wasn't built on 100% federation from the start.

I've been wondering about Bluesky's decentralization again. I can't think of any reason why I'd want to self-host Bluesky in its current form. I cannot 100% self host "my own Bluesky".

Their main selling points for building their own protocol were easier migration and better discoverability, but right now there's no simple way to migrate my Bluesky account to my own instance. And hosting the centralized parts yourself isn't really possible, or if it were, not affordable, they haven't made that feasible, by design, it seems.

Even if you self-host a PDS, Bluesky's Relay only indexes up to 10 accounts from it. You can run more, but they won't federate, the central infrastructure decides what gets seen. They control this (source: https://docs.bsky.app/blog/self-host-federation#:~:text=For%20a%20smooth%20transition%20into,for%20everyone%20in%20the%20ecosystem.). You can self-host a PDS (Personal Data Server), but you still depend on Bluesky's centralized Relay and AppView. There's no production-ready alternative infrastructure from what I gather.

It feels like I'd be renting a room in a hotel that someone else is running anyway, when I want my own hotel.

If Mastodon gGmbH vanishes tomorrow, my instance keeps running and federating with everyone else. If Bluesky PBC vanishes, the ecosystem would need to scramble to stand up replacement infrastructure that doesn't really exist yet.

ATProto keeps getting evaluated on its promises while other systems get evaluated on their merits. The "portability" selling point depends on infrastructure that isn't mature enough to actually catch you if Bluesky falls.

I trust W3C, the builders and fathers of the World Wide Web, ActivityPub and the Fediverse.

#Decentralization #SelfHosting #SelfHosted #Mastodon #Fediverse #Bluesky #Servers

Early Access Federation for Self-Hosters | Bluesky

For a high-level introduction to data federation, as well as a comparison to other federated social protocols, check out the Bluesky blog.

Show threadLarsNygard

@rolle

The problem with self hosting and mastodon is that only a handful of tech people actually care to host their own. Hosting an instance starts to cost serious money if you have a lot of users.

I think the best solution would be a torrent based solution that can run entirely in a browser. I've started working on such a client, but development is stale right now for resources, time and knowledge.

I've successfully synced profiles from LAN to a mobile on cellular network, so the concept should work.

If anyone wants to take a look, fork or join, let me know:

https://github.com/larsnygard/SnartNet

Jan 17 at 10:37amWeb
Show threadRoni Rolle LaukkarinenJan 17
@Lach "Only a handful"? As far as I know, there are tens of thousands of instances in the Fediverse. You can host your own server on the Fediverse with a Raspberry Pi if you want, or you can start a WordPress blog anywhere and use that. Or you can start using Ghost or Writefreely without any technical knowledge. The same definitely doesn't apply to Bluesky.
Show threadLarsNygardJan 17

@rolle

Not everyone can host their own. Most of my friends and family can't. If you host an instance and get two thousand users, it won't be free to host. Ten thousands instances is a handful in this matter. And if you host your own instance and have a million followers?

Torrents can scale for all of this. It will also be impossible to block. No central servers to attack. No central storage of data.

Show threadRoni Rolle LaukkarinenJan 17
@Lach Yeah, P2P works to some extent. The Nostr blockchain concept is also quite interesting. But in my opinion, the Fediverse thrives because we share resources to a certain degree. Not every post is hosted by every instance.