So the plan is moving from a centralised platform to another centralised platform? As a loop? :)
Btw do you have any good suggestions for distributed platforms? Would Mastodon be considered a distributed platform?
Personally, I'm eager because it's not just another centralized platform but a sufficiently distributed one. Most of the infrastructure you need for ATProto, you can run yourself today.
Mastodon/ActivityPub is neat too, but personally I don't find it as easy to find interesting stuff there, especially if you try to run your own solo instance and need to make sure you connect to interesting parts of the ActivityPub-net.
Citation needed. Without the AppView and their relays you are left only with your identity and your data, which by itself is not a social media/messaging platform.
I think this[0] was on HN some time ago with good reasoning about bluesky offering a "potentially decentralized enough" while not actually being so.
0: https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
I have sixteen terabytes mirrored sitting next to my television. It's 2025. Sixteen terabytes is not that much any more.
But rather than the only options being "global megacorp" or "individual", I think people should consider the possibility of medium-sized collective organizations for doing this kind of thing. You could club together to run a PDS. There are more options for organizational scale than "huge" or "atomized".
I agree 100% with you that we probably want mid-scale orgs to run relays and those would be able to run it without issues (I wrote "not so easy" rather than "impossible" :) ) but I think it's significant we haven't seen a single one popping up yet.
But again, the article I linked makes a very good point: Bluesky does not need to actually be decentralized as long as it is a "credible exit" that someone else could in theory run their own Relay/AppView, even if no-one does.
I have a 512GB laptop and a 64GB phone, that's all the local storage I own.
1. There's a contingent that does not like the management of X, so they want to move elsewhere.
2. The technology aspect of it is irrelevant in the decision making, because most people don't understand it.
3. Moreover, a truly free, federated system doesn't alleviate any of their complaints about the platform, because, in that case, they would be unable to effectively quarantine the others.
I don't really care how the platform works so long as the content is the content I want. Nor does 99% of users. And that's the precise reason the centralized platforms are the good ones: that's where people are.
If a truly distributed platform could be created that had the content/people/appearance of the centralized one, then great. I'd want that. But if it would be slightly slower or harder to use, or lack the people/content of a centralized platform then I'm not interested.
Decentralized could be fine for communicating with a _community_ of some kind. But that's not why I'm on X/Bluesky. It's to drink from the firehose of the current times. If something happens in the world I want to see the actual people who drive those events. Read the instant comments of the biggest most famous commenters of the same events.
There's good content there. Distributed is better than centralized, but it doesn't matter if the people I'm interested in talking to and hearing from aren't there.
Having been interested in how people use social communication systems since the BBS era, I'm pretty confident that most people don't really want fully distributed systems, they want a single system with good governance. Because governance is hard work and anarcholibertarianism makes it everyone's problem. However, "Exit, Voice, And Loyalty" applies here: by providing a theoretical Exit option in some sort of decentralization, even if someone never takes that option, they feel a benefit from having the option.
But in general, if you don't understand why people are moving to Bluesky, you probably need to be more in tune with US politics and realize we have a nazi in the white house who also happens to own Twitter.
Except that servers cost money, and internet is not free.
Im all for setting up mesh networks with appropriate protocols that are truly decentralized, but people have to be willing to accept lots of pain points and slowness along the way, which quickly makes people not care.
If it allows polling static pages, then everyone can host their timeline on Github Pages or something. That would be much better decentralized.