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Comment by irusensei | Hacker News Reader

Bluesky doesn’t sound very decentralized to me.

My understanding is that Bluesky is a service built on top of a decentralized protocol, ATProto. This allows users to use alternative hosts for their data instead of the bluesky servers, but if you're using Bluesky then they still hold your data.

I also think the private DMs might be hosted externally to ATProto because that is all meant to be public information or something.

I would assume that the age verification is built at the app layer, so you could use an alternative app (I think they call them AppViews?) to get around the age verification thing. Don't know if alternatives really exist today though, there are probably some.

There's a few, I really like PinkSky which makes BlueSky into Instagram instead of Twitter.

Age verification is done in the client (app/website) the appview (CTO calls it an appserver now) is the backend that services api requests from the default, and most other, clients. DMs themselves are not stored in ATproto, and are kind of a hack.

You can migrate your PDS (data server) away from bluesky's servers to another host, and as of a few days ago you can migrate back. (only if you initially signed up to bluesky, not if you started off self-hosting)

The following gist is good to glean how the age-verification system works: https://gist.github.com/mary-ext/6e27b24a83838202908808ad528...

Blue sky isn't really decentralised. They keep way too much power to themselves.

I don't use it for that reason. I do use nostr, Mastodon and Lemmy

It isn't really, it's "Postel decentralization" (a lot of early internet services people might have assumed were distributed were in fact just a guy, John Postel).

I don't think that matters in this context where the rules apply regardless of decentralization. However, I believe that you can in fact just use the protocol without any of the "age verification" nonsense the UK government has imposed on us.

The age verification is client side and can easily be bypassed with a third party client or even with a userscript https://gist.github.com/mary-ext/6e27b24a83838202908808ad528...

Bluesky's apps have the verification, but everything else using the protocol can just not implement it.

It sounds like a dumb kind of centralization; yes, you can download all your old stuff, in the hopes that someone else will host it for you eventually.

The smarter thing is the thing we already have with email (and that Mastodon can do) -- you have to place trust somewhere, so do it with whatever decentralized server you choose. I get that it's not robust -- or more specifically you DO have to trust whoever's running the server -- but that's better that the now obvious goofy centralization that Bluesky is now subject to.

That's what Jack Dorsey realized too, which is why he's a Nostr guy these days.

Nostr is just a protocol. on which you can just as easy build centralized platforms:)

It seems like ATProto and Nostr have a similar architecture and similar centralization failure modes in the relay servers. The "you can run your own but in practice nobody does" problem.

According to https://nostr.watch there is a considerable number of operational relays.

From what I understand from BlueSky is that personal PDS can host accounts and content but the network depends on big hubs like the main bluesky instance. It almost feels more like a convenient cost cutting strategy from the company behind BlueSky than actual decentralization. Correct me if I'm wrong.

This sounds worse than Mastodon. As for Nostr is more of a one to many system where a user would sign a message and post it to a bunch of relays where it can be fetched all while said message itself contains hints where to find it.

> According to https://nostr.watch there is a considerable number of operational relays.

But on Nostr you can build a social app that uses only your relays and your relays can reject anything from everyone else

ATProto is a protocol too. No need to use bluesky itself.

But isn’t this just referring to the app view? And there can be (and are) many independent implementations of the app view?

Bluesky is centralised. Using technology that could also hypothetically support a decentralised platform does not make the centralised platform decentralised. https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/

yup, completely centralized. The decentralization angle pretty died on spot after anime artists migrating from Twitter was about to hit a critical mass and someone forced them so-called moderation to fix that.

It isn't, it relies on a single BGS router server.

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