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Comment by tapoxi | Hacker News Reader

I don't really understand this architecture, but I thought Bluesky was distributed like Mastodon? How can it have an outage?

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This writeup is useful for backend engineers: https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers

The simple answer is that atproto works like the web & search engines, where the apps aggregate from the distributed accounts. So the proper analogy here would be like yahoo going down in 1999.

Google and MSN Search were already available at this time. Also websites used to publish webrings and there was IRC and forums to ask people about things.

This is a fantastic write-up, thanks for sharing!

Sorry, but this analogy is very misleading, no one browses websites through Google's servers.

For example, right now in my URL bar I read "news.ycombinator.com", not "google.com/profile/news.ycombinator.com".

If Google goes down now I can keep browsing this website and all the other websites I have in all my other tabs as if nothing had happened.

Does Google Reader help you make sense of it? It’s more like each app is like its own Google Reader. And indeed you were able to access the same posts via other apps at that time of outage.

Do you have ideas about how Bluesky could decentralize?

Not the original poster but I do have some ideas. Official Bluesky clients could randomly/round-robin access 3-4 different appview servers run by different organizations instead of one centralized server. Likewise there could be 3-4 relays instead of one. Upgrades could roll across the servers so they don't all get hit by bugs immediately.

If multiple personal data servers (pdses) share the same set of posts how would we guarantee that they are tamper resistant to third parties?

PDSes should be sharded not replicated. Your posts live on your PDS which lives in one place (although it can move).

What's stopping us from doing both?

Cost and complexity tradeoffs. IMO the relay/appview is the current bottleneck.

This is why I'm hoping fiatjaf has a recommendation here. I have a feeling he might have a proposal that solves this. But doesn't solve all of it, just some of it.

Technically you can still view the posts directly from the PDS. It’s just uninteresting compared to web pages

> no one browses websites through Google's servers.

Didn't Google's AMP project do exactly that?

It’s more of a concept of a plan for being distributed. I even went through the trouble of hosting my own PDC and still, I was unable to use the service during the outage

It's not really distributed. It's a centralised service that pulls some parts of 0.01% of user profiles from their own servers.

Mastodon infra can have outages, too.

It's just confined to one instance if it goes down, not all of Mastodon.

"decentralized"

A web interface and home server can have an outage. Bluesky is just a web interface and home server.

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