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Comment by eukara | Hacker News Reader

Truth is if mastodon.social gets ddosd the same as Bluesky I can still use the rest of the network fine. Proof is in the pudding. tons of instances that make up the fabric of redundancy. I think most people would be served better if Bluesky acted differently early with their rollout in a sharded manner?

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True. The only 'distributed' part of bluesky is in the PR. Otherwise there'd be more instances.

My mastodon account is not even on mastodon.social, because why would I, when I could have a home server closer to home

i get real tired of people trumpeting that bsky is distributed.

Can i run a private node? can i run a functional node completely within my network segment? because i can with gnusocial and misskey; i've never run mastodon; i am on fosstodon and a couple of other mastodon-likes.

bluesky is to discord what mastodon (fedi) is to IRC.

don't let the fact that most people use the main instances fool you, there's thousands (maybe tens of thousands) of instances. I haven't seen a tally recently, i forget the account that shows them for each "instance type", like pleroma, misskey, mastodon, pixelfed, whatever the reddit clone is, whatever the 4chan clone is, and so on.

anyhow when elon bought twitter mastodon surged. I hope they didn't spend millions upgrading the main instances because most of that dropped off because, you know, everyone's on twitter. only a few million on mastodon.

My whole point is, trying to shoehorn words like "distributed" into a system that i cannot run independently is, well it's just not distributed, that's all.

edit: maybe this is sour grapes because i never got an invite; but maybe i think it's just twitter with a different coat of paint and different buzzwords attached.

Two times some guys at Mastodon tried to convince me to try Bluesky.

I explicitly told them that I want something distributed and that's a high priority, not a nice-to-have.

Yesss, there's definitely some very cheeky marketing going on.

This is half true. If mastodon.social goes down every single one of the accounts made on that instance go down as well. In truly decentralized protocols you own your identity and can take it elsewhere, for instance, in Nostr and SSB, a relay/pub going down is no big deal since you can connect to other servers and maintain communications.

historic posts from the known network and (sometimes media, instance setting) are cached on your own instance in ActivityPub. interactions travel across the known network graph. if an instance vanished forever, overnight, there is at least an imprint of it across the network, albeit instance specific. that may be by design, there are jurisdictions that have people complying with laws and things. not sure how the ecosystems you mention deal with that in particular

That doesn’t answer the point I’m making. If the instance your account was made on explodes, YOU lose your social graph, wether some of your posts survive cached elsewhere is not relevant, your account is gone, and so are your connections.

You have no way to prove an account made after the original instance went down belongs to someone, that’s the issue with federated systems.

As for content moderation, in nostr relay operators such as nostr.build handle legal takedowns on a daily basis, SSB is a little trickier since it’s mostly p2p but pubs are still able to control what flows through them to some degree.

the web, which also gets referred to as decentralized, suffers from the same proof problem. we have identity tied largely to dns. web sites can claim whatever. somewhere a line was drawn to indicate what matters most is creating something without a single point of failure?

Blacksky and other instances of bluesky are not affected, what are you talking about?

Not true, they were down because they still use bluesky's relay

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