Apparently Bluesky has one centralized service, the "relay"
mastodon.online
mastodon.online
I've seen many times - company switching from free, open-source, distributed solution to a worse, closed-source, coporate-backed solution just so they have someone to sign a contract with.
First time it was moving from self-hosted Jabber to MSN Messanger (is sucked, worked less reliably than self-hosted jabber, didn't worked on Linux, and was probably way more expansive in the long run). Then it was moving from self-hosted wikis to some B2B solution. Then it was self-hosted git to corporate github or sth similar.
I understand the theory behind outsourcing these things, especially if you're just starting. But if you already have the OS solution deployed and working - why switch?
A lot of the content on bluesky, but especially in its early days, is about how the protocol is great, its potential and what bright future it will lead us into. Their main investors are a crypto bro company. Their CEO has built her career around crypto. It's the same rhetoric.
Now it's about decentralized "verification". They still haven't defined what they're verifying except a vague term "the person posting is who they say they are", but it's not actual identity verification.
The endgame is probably monetizing the protocol by connecting it to some form of identity for crypto-bs or paywalling engagement via the verification.
The relay is described here and here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.03239, https://atproto.com/guides/glossary#relay
The protocol Bluesky is built on is certainly decentralized. It’s really fucking annoying that people act like it’s not “real” decentralization, when in fact it’s just a different flavor of decentralization on the technical level compared to, say, the fediverse.
Turns out the biggest challenge was not in getting users, but in convincing admins to join the network. Instances with open registrations are already dealing with spammer accounts, and none of them was excited about the idea of this extra vector for having unvetted users on their services.
This doesn't mean that centralized services are safe, though. I am reasonably convinced that we can have "social media" that is less focused on "platforms" and more like what we (used to) have with web: companies and institutions owning their presence by running ActivityPub "servers" on their own domain, and a hotch-potch of community/commercial servers to serve the users who want "basic access".
But to get there, we need to stop thinking that the way to get rid of Facebook/Twitter/Reddit/Instagram/YouTube is by taking their templates and tacking "but federated!", and we need to really come up with a killer app on ActivityPub (or Solid, or Linked Data, or ActivityPods) to disrupt the whole thing entirely.
The incentives for homeserver admins are extremely perverted and it's why the Mastodon network in particular is so dominated by ideological cliques.
Running a homeserver is thankless, laborious, and expensive, and the costs go up with each user. There's no money for it, so admins have to be compensated another way. Either they get off on the power, or have an ideological axe to grind and thus moral compensation, or they are altruistic and eventually burn out when they are subjected to the abuse of the job.
The financial story has to be solved. Admins must be paid to run services or the services get distorted to compensate them some other way.
You are preaching to the converted. :) [0]
I might be wrong, but I think that my instance was the first to provide accounts only to paying subscribers, and even today there are only 2 others like mine.
[0] https://mastodon.communick.com/@raphael/114365227998082545
Nobody is confused when you hand them a user@gmail.com, user@hotmail.com, etc; I use my own user@whatever.com and sometimes get a blank stare, until people realise you can go to www.gmail.com to check your own inbox, and you can totally just type www.whatever.com into your browser.
Links like reddit.com/u/user, youtube.com/@user, already exist and are de facto a standard of some kind. If we stop trying to make @user@whatever.com a thing, the only obstacle is in convincing people that whatever.com/user is just another link you can click, and this is totally how they can reach you - send you a message.
Federation between servers is an entirely different topic, but for the purpose of this discussion we can assume it's just an implementation detail - just like SMTP is for GMail users.
I'm probably making this sound more trivial than it actually is, but IMO all you have to do is build up on existing paradigms and collective understanding.
(I say this as someone running my own email server, who periodically has problems sending to gmail.)
About the same number of people who set up their own WWW server, modulo the absolute PITA that is email.
Still, federation between GMail, Hotmail, iCloud, Yahoo, ProtonMail, etc does work. You don't have as many choices but it can still feel overwhelming if you're shopping for an alternative. People at Corp & Co use their @corpnco.com addresses daily. My personal email is connected to iCloud, but I can always point my MX elsewhere. Running your own Mastodon instance is costly - however fediverse already leans on smaller interconnecting communities.
Nobody sets up an AS just to run some fiber to their home. Decentralisation and federation just happen at different levels and scales.
Normal people (and even some not-normal people) don’t want to deal with that. “Instances” are a bad model.
[1]: https://tootworld.social/@lilythelonelygirl/1143999833553083...
[2]: https://tau-ceti.space/@lo__@mastodon.social/114394202556951...
After all email is very federated and it works fine. And people have no issue grokking it. The implementation matters.
Your comment also implies their actions affect all other instances just by seldomly doing this action. Which isn't the case.
We can cherry pick all day, but one cannot take the whole Fediverse down like it happened with Bluesky. Which is the topic at hand.
Nobody is going to defederate from mastodon.social, but otherwise, this is all true.
But yeah, the majority of people won't ever understand that. And, in all honesty, that's fine.
Really, I'm cool with just having people around who care enough to grasp that. If you care that's cool, if not ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Nevertheless, this discussion is a whole other topic. They are just pointing out a potential issue.
The issue is that relays tend to require a lot more resources to operate than appviews and PDSes (though not necessarily as much as that blog post suggests; I recall posts of people running their own relays on RPi4s with NVMe drives), so it's common for alternative appviews to rely on Bluesky's relay instead of taking on the expense of spinning up a new one.
In any case, as that toot notes, the Bluesky outage was on a PDS level rather than a relay level. And thankfully it's much less expensive to run your own PDS; apparently those who do so weren't impacted.
[1] https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-us-free-social-media-from-bi...
[2] https://freeourfeeds.com/ § FAQ § What will the money be used for?
That wasn't asserted anywhere. Quite the opposite: as I explained above, the expense is why few people have done it (and even fewer have done it in production). It's the PDSes which are (relatively) cheap and easy to self-host.
> why then "Free Our Feeds" initiative [0] looking to raise $4,000,000 [1] to establish a second relay [2]?
Per the section you cite, they're doing a lot more with that money than running a second relay: they're spinning up an entirely separate organization independent of Bluesky to develop ATproto and applications using it. That includes, but is nowhere implied or explied to be limited to, the "second relay" they mention.
In any case, even the self-hosted relay described in that above-linked blog post (let alone some RPi under someone's bed) is in all likelihood a long ways off from one that's even remotely production-ready. There's no mention of redundancy, no mention of future-proofing, etc. It's reasonable to assume that the "second relay" would be multiple such relays, likely on machines with even beefier specs - in other words, at least as capable as the existing Bluesky-managed relay. I'd also be unsurprised if it expanded to a "third relay" and "fourth relay" and so on.
Further, there's more to running a relay than just the hardware; you need someone to maintain it. $4 million pays for 40 employee-years (assuming every employee is full-time with an annual salary of $100k). That could be one sysadmin for 40 years, or an 8 person team for 5 years, or a 40 person team for 1 year, or what have you. Free our feeds claims they'll need $30 million over 3 years, i.e. $10 million per year; if half that goes to salaries, we end up with a napkin-math-guesstimated team size of 50 - which is about the size I'd expect for an organization that wants to independently maintain a bunch of technical infrastructure, develop applications, prod whomever needs prodded to get ATproto formally standardized, etc.
> [running a relay being cheap and easy] wasn't asserted anywhere
With
> I recall posts of people running their own relays on RPi4s with NVMe drives
I would absolutely consider software I can host at home, on a RPi, cheap and easy to self-host. That's the assertion that's being called out here. Bluesky's relays do not scale down easily, and are difficult and expensive to host
That's expensive and difficult compared to running a PDS or appview (either of which can run with a tiny fraction of even an RPi's resources), which is exactly what I said. And to reiterate: an RPi4 with an NVMe SSD is very far off from something that's production-ready and suitable for public use. You can run your own relay, but it's probably not going to handle 30+ million users like Bluesky's relay does, or like Free Our Feeds' "second relay" presumably seeks to do.
- You don’t understand what a relay does in atproto given the rest of your reply and should look.
Compared to the hardware required to run a PDS, yes, absolutely. "Expensive" is relative.
And like I've said above, a Raspberry Pi with an NVMe drive is surely a long ways off from Bluesky's own relay. It's good enough for personal needs, not for any sort of production use.
> You don’t understand what a relay does in atproto given the rest of your reply and should look.
I'd appreciate specific corrections, so that I (and anyone else reading these comments) can be better-informed.
(EDIT: my apologies for the previous version of this comment, which might've come across a bit hostile. That ain't my intention.)
the relay at this point is non-archival and can be spun up trivially. with a small sliding history window for subscriber catchup u can use like 32gb of scratch disk space and keep a few hours, the relay is literally just a subscribeRepos forwarder from PDSes.
the AppView is vastly more expensive to run since you need to handle the write volume of all bsky activity. if you build a non-bsky app on atproto this is a non-issue
the issue here really is that nobody writes about the state of things in long form outside the network so it's not really known how fast things move and change by those not engaged with the platform
Re: write traffic, my understanding is that the appviews shift most (if not all) of that burden to the PDSes, no?
- bluesky's feed gen post-dropping is about internal operation of their appview and not anything to do with network sync semantics
- if you're running an AppView for the bsky data you are likely keeping a copy of all bsky posts in a database, since fetching from PDSes on-the-fly is network intensive over a relatively small pipe, which is what i mean by write volume requirements.
Gotcha; thanks for the clarifications/corrections. Good to know that the firehose bandwidth is a lot less than I thought (though 20Mbps can certainly add up to some hefty pricetags depending on how you're billed for traffic).
> if you're running an AppView for the bsky data you are likely keeping a copy of all bsky posts in a database, since fetching from PDSes on-the-fly is network intensive over a relatively small pipe, which is what i mean by write volume requirements.
Right, but how much of that actually needs to hit the disk? I'd imagine most appviews can readily get away with just keeping posts in RAM, and even if disk storage is desired (e.g. to avoid needing to pull everything from the PDSes if an appview server reboots), it ain't like the writes need to be synchronous or low-latency. A full-blown ACID-compliant DBMS is probably overkill.
It'd also be overkill to cache all posts, rather than subsets (e.g. each users' "Discover" and "Following" feeds), so I reckon that'd also reduce the in-appview caching needs further.
bluesky chooses to not refetch data from PDSes all the time so that the load for a PDS stays low (they like it to be possible to run on a home connection)
Keep posting on your website and keep linking. It's called the 'web' for a reason.
Yes, historic ones. It's not a prediction about the future shape of the internet.
Even pointing out that people have a choice - with some work, yes, but only a little work - elicits some counter response that basically comes down to: no, you don't have a choice. I don't like that, and it also signals creative laziness.
P.S. Zoom out a little. The open web is also client/server (although peer-to-peer would be nice), that's not the point. We all need some infra, some trust, and a clear rule of law for the internet and the web to work. We just don't need big tech's view of 'social media' (there's nothing social about that) or platforms that present themselves as being an alternative as long as we have the perfect alternative - called the open web - being around for thirty years, battle tested and actively maintained by millions.
P.P.S. This is in reply to you, but read it as a general opinion, it's not a personal attack on anything you said.
And demanding everyone buy and own a domain name & figure out hosting seems unviable as requirements for the world's mass communication system.
The Bluesky PDS architecture is a lovely lovely modest & small iteration on the web, adds only a bit more. To make your vault of content still addressable, still a URL, but one tied to a cryptographic identifier. And to make the content all signed and secure.
Wait, how did a decentralized service like Bluesky go down? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43789178 - April 2025 (2 comments)
Which is fine, I don’t care either, but this whole spiel that they are decentralized feels dishonest.
- The downtime was not relay level, but it was a PDS level. So the point is moot already.
- Because it was decentralized at the PDS level, the outage did not affect anyone with personal PDSes, which contains the data that you care about.
- Even if it was the relay level, relays aren’t centralized, anyone can spin up another relay (because everything on the relay is derived from PDS data). It’s just that it’s going to be pretty expensive and consume much resources. Which is a fair point, and might be argued that the network currently has a single big point of failure, but that doesn’t mean it’s centralized.
And then people now start arguing that the fact that BlueSky-hosted PDSes went down at the same time is now another proof that BlueSky is centralized?
That’s like arguing that Gmail can go down and all @gmail.com mail addresses won’t work, so email is centralized. Or AWS can have an outage and all AWS-powered websites will break down, so the web is centralized.
One can say that there’s a single big point of failure (which the BlueSky LLC is, just like AWS, Gmail, or the mastodon.social instance in the case of Fedi), but that doesn’t make the whole service centralized.
I’ve listened to interviews with the Bluesky CEO and the Mastodon founder (CEO?), and it was quite eye opening. They have very different views on their roles. The Bluesky CEO is thinking at the level of community building, incentives, longevity, and decentralisation at a fundamental level, whereas the Mastodon founder seems primarily motivated by building an open source project and supporting contributions from the community.
Neither approach is wrong, but they’re different and are clearly achieving different things.
Mastodon might be easier to self host on the surface, being just another Rails site, but the result isn’t a “world without caesars”, it’s a world with a lot more caesars, where anyone can be one. Migrating instances is roughly impossible if you have any presences you want to preserve, and ActivityPub compliance is essentially defined by Mastodon’s current behaviour.
Bluesky on the other hand seems to so far be far more successful at the community building and laying out the protocol foundations, at the cost of being harder to self host. But honestly, having self hosted Mastodon and switched (and forced to start again in the process), so what? Hosting a PDS is trivial and that’s the bit that really matters anyway.
Mastodon should be recognised for how much it shifted the conversation around social networking, especially in the first year after Twitter’s acquisition, but it seems clear that Bluesky has some fundamental advancements that Mastodon fans seem unable to recognise simply because it looks so different.
If you teach people why they should care, I believe many actually do care. Many users just don't know enough to make a choice.
Bluesky is only getting some attention now from people outside of tech because Musk is disliked and it’s basically the only alternative. I assure you most of them don’t know or care what “decentralized” means.
Now I see how each of the major social media networks has been involved in censorship of Israel's genocide in Palestine (including btw HN), it makes me realize how important decentralization is.
I think a lot of Americans (and other countries who have essentially handed over their media to US social media companies) are going to learn same lessons soon, as Trump starts to leverage the existing censorship tools more broadly.
Reddit is extremely centralized, and you can find hundreds of subreddits that do cover Israel's ethnic cleansing. However, most popular subreddits are heavily censored, while the smaller communities become an echo chamber, and often get radicalized.
Decentralized bubbles are still bubbles—even worse, since the barrier to entry is higher.
Don't get me wrong, I care deeply about privacy and want a decentralized works, but it comes with its own cans of worms.
There are other factors in play though that I think help create less polarising and radical social networks - ability to create custom homepage feeds gives to more variety and less control by the platform maker to sway audiences. Non-commercial networks (which doesn't count Bluesky) have less incentives to juice engagement. More distributed networks have levers audiences can pull if the main developers steer the network in the wrong direction.
> since people on the extreme political spectrum will always try harder than the regulars
Imagine if anyone could create an alternate feed algorithm that penalises these try-hards which people could subscribe to and use instead of the default.
So the state and the ruling class produced a radicalization of the masses themselves where the status quo is to pretend that genocide is normal - a "zone of interest" type of effect is supposed to be part of what's "normal". While I agree with you that decentralization is not a silver bullet, because it can create pockets of echo chambers, it's still a good tool for communities to be independent from certain influences like from the state or corporate culture.
I'd say that inaccessible bubbles become echo chambers of people screaming into the void. The point is the be visible and heard, and federation does the opposite.
Facebook is censoring pro-Palestine views? My friends must not have gotten the news.
I don't think it's as easy to run nostr relays as activitypub instances but maybe I am wrong. ActivityPub seems way more active than nostr also. Most of what I see on nostr is either cryptocurrency discussion or the kinds of alt-lite content you would find on Gab or Minds
Bitcoin discussion yes, but mostly because bitcoiners are avid self hosters. Cryptocurrency not much. The “crypto” people created their own thing if I’m not mistaken.
Nostr was spun out as a truly censorship resistant protocol so it’s a given people who distrusts both centralized services and island style moderation are there don’t you think?
dergigi once described Nostr with an analogy to a gay bar. The place is nice, the furniture is fancy, the drinks pleasant and the people who frequent it are mostly nice but if you are not gay you won’t stick for so long.
Nothing keeps you from creating a moderated relay or curate your feeds though.
One of the coolest things about Nostr IMO is how extendable the protocol is and how easy you can develop crazy stuff for it.
Ah and for some reason there are some Japanese users.
Hell there's even a streaming platform on nostr too. The common criticism is that its all bitcoiners, that's mainly because it uses Lightning Network for zaps and that's how people get paid in nostr. So naturally its a lot of bitcoiners in the nostr communities.