Not necessarily. Just one famous example; BitTorrent is decentralized but for most people it's just "run this app, download files". "Decentralized" just means "doesn't rely on a centralized service to accomplish a goal". As long as the application isn't too complex to install and use, most folks won't care one way or the other whether it's decentralized or not, as long as it accomplishes the goal they're looking to accomplish.
In practice this issue arise something like this: A decentralized service is launched it is so decentralized the user has to store their own private keys. Later a centralized solution is launched where the user does not have to go through the trouble of storing the private keys, everything is managed for them... everyone joins the centralized service.
In my mind, I put them somewhere in-between, leaning a tad more toward "centralized" because they still rely on an individual to host the service no matter how "federated" they are. Until they're truly peer-to-peer, there's still that aspect of centralization involved. We need something kinda like BitTorrent but for messaging / social connections.
Although Git repositories are portable, PRs, issues, actions and such aren't — so even if the migration away from Bluesky is lossy the comparison seems apt.
1. Cross-platform engagement
Create content via one platform and engage with users on other platforms.
2. Moderation choice
Voluntarily opt into moderation policies that reflect the experience you want.
3. Data portability
Data portability and credible exit are built in (you can take your data and followers with you).
4. Advertising disincentive
Portability prevents lock-in or captive audiences, which disincentivizes advertising.
5. Algorithmic choice
Users can choose the feeds and algorithms that work for them.
It's not do it yourself, it's more having more control if you want too.
I don't think this is a technology problem, its more of a socioeconomic problem. People tend to choose the centralized option and projects that start out decentralized tend to end up centralized WWW-Social media, Email-Gmail, Git-Github, Bitcoin-Coinbase etc
My family just thinks Jellyfin and Navidrome is another Netflix or Spotify they have access to. And most of them prefer Jellyfin as content doesn’t disappear and is much more curated.
Also, I think many users would now appreciate more control over the moderation policies they want applied, and also be able to choose between different feed algorithms to find one that promotes things that they prefer.
Would most people still probably use the one big "instance"? For sure, but I think you'd still have a good 20-30% that would use alternatives.
Assuming it all just-worked. Which I think is what this article is trying to say, the AT protocol can provide these features and ease of use. I don't know if that's true, but it seems to be the claim.
Personally i'm a little doubtful that bluesky is decentralized in a way that matters.
Getting banned from Facebook means loosing access to all of that. Kinda like getting banned from YouTube could mean loss of access to email, groups, drive and a bunch of other services. Hell I’ve heard of company contractors getting banned from Google Play’s Developer and everyone in the company then getting banned from all Google services!
If I get banned from a Lemmy community that doesn’t ban me from other communities or other servers and I can always run my own if I need to.
So, if you have the technical skills and the willingness to host an ActivityPub-enabled instance, you can serve it for others who either don't have the skills or ability to manage it themselves. If you keep it limited just to the folks in your own communities - people you know, friends of friends, etc. - then you limit a lot of the issues that arise from running huge instances - moderation, privacy issues, etc.
We took something natively decentralized - TCP/IP internet - and handed it off to handful of companies to run, thus centralizing it. That was a mistake, especially as they use the power they acquired to push back against folks, for example, trying to build independent community ISPs.
We need to decentralize as much as feasible - it's not all self-hosting, but "just let the money perverts run things" has not worked out so well for us. The solution lay somewhere in the middle, where cooperative groups serve the needs of the communities that matter to them in exchange for fair compensation.
This is not and was not ever true. IP was explicitly designed from the start to be difficult to operate without centralisation because the telecoms operators wanted to maintain their "monopoly" on communications infrastructure.
That is why IP insisted on not separating the interface address from device/service identity despite knowing ahead of time this would make multihoming a nightmare (as it did with ARPANET) and despite this problem already having been solved by CYCLADES (it being basically the one feature they explicitly avoided adopting from CYCLADES).
That among other things.
This is in large part why BGP is and always has been such a clusterfuck. There were known issues ahead of time but they were willfully ignored as they made relying on the heavily centralised telecoms operators essentially always the path of least resistance.
Limewire was installed on over one-third of computers world wide in 2007 [1]. That's because even grandma could press next->next->next on a window setup file and it just worked. There is no technical reason hosting your email isn't as easy as that.
Look at roof top solar panel. Literally hundreds of millions of households have roof top solar to generate decentralized power. The fundamental complexity in email hosting is hundred times less, but the software engineering community choose to not make it possible.
Here's a post on one of my Leaflet publications under my own domain: https://foxes.kyefox.com/3lx46ftzhhc27
This post is stored in Leaflet's own lexicon in its own collection right next to all my Bluesky data. I could move this to a different PDS if I wanted. I could come up with a script to turn the collection into static pages or convert them to another platform's import format.
Nobody cares about decentralization until they do[0] and AT seems to have the best answer for that eventuality.
[0] https://kyefox.com/nobody-cares-about-decentralization-until...
You can run your own name server, but there's no good way for large numbers of people to voluntarily opt out of the existing system.
What you originally said could be interpreted as either DNS-the-system or DNS-the-protocol. I assumed the former, since that seemed more likely.
Sure, the protocol could be used without the resolver hierarchy, but I would argue that's not a useful way to think about it, since it won't happen in practice.