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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>And at every layer except for maybe the PLC directory, there's nothing stopping anyone from fixing that “almost nobody does” problem.

If there's nothing stopping anyone from fixing a problem, and yet nobody fixes it, then there's something is stopping them.

Might not be a technical impossibility, or a gun in their head. Could be as simple as inertia or addiction.

But saying "the problem is totally solvable" just because there's a solution available, is pretty naive. Solutions have costs themselves, and not all are created equal or equally feasible.

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A relay or appview needs a ton of resources. Blacksky finally created the second ever real-world usable appview instance after 2.5 years.

Also, the open source version of the appview doesn't work at Bluesky scale. You need a proprietary database for sufficient speed.

AT Proto is completely decentralised, except for all the structural and financial points of absolute centralisation.

The relay is not that bad, the only really bad part is building an index, and most apps on the atmosphere have no need to index bluesky records, so the economics for them look very different.

The work towards permissioned data and group-shared data will make it so apps can choose their own levels of "decentralization" of "federation" on atproto primitives. For example, two diametric options

1. An app that is not open source code, but still does all the same atproto credible exit stuff. Naturally leans into winner-take-all

2. An app that is tied to community, think something like Discord, where most servers don't care about what other servers are doing. Each community could run their own version and only care about their data. This is raspberry pi hostable.

Or people don't think it's a problem!

Maybe there are a ton of people who joined Bluesky because twitter devolved into a room-temperature-IQ right-wing hell hole, not because they cared about federation or whatever.

Everything has trade-offs. Again and again people choose centralized services because they are a better product.

It's exactly that. I have an account on Mastodon that I haven't opened in months. I use Bluesky a couple of times a day. On Mastodon I couldn't find interesting accounts to follow for weeks. On Bluesky I was up and running after an hour thanks to starter packs. Ease of use trumps (what a word!) philosophy for me. And probably most other people too.

BTW I already lost 10 years of posting on Twitter. Did not care for a second. Do people REALLY care about their postings on micro blog sites? It's not like a box of photographs that I would pass to my children on my deathbed...

Just FYI, starter packs were implemented on Mastodon, or rather, around Mastodon quite a while ago, so maybe give it another shot.

That being said, the nature of Mastodon does still make it more difficult to find interesting accounts.

Thanks, that's awesome! I will give it a try because I love idea of federated networks a lot. Just couldn't find my way in the jungle.

>Or people don't think it's a problem!

Often that's a problem on its own (e.g. climate change)

This was the reason I went to Bluesky. I understand the political advantages of decentralization, but centralized services work better.

Remember that SMTP, the most decentralized platform that worked, now is centralized in a handful of companies.

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