Oddbean new post about login | logout See that’s not true. They have actually made material progress towards their decentralization goals and suggesting “it’s just Web 2.0 centralized crap” is just being intellectually lazy.
thoughts @Alex Gleason 🐍 ?
bluesky is very clever. it gets people to provide hosting for the project, providing the marketable illusion of decentralization. but retains centralized control which they will never give up, and will use under the guise of “safety”. its neo-liberalism as a digital platform. time to “spread some democracy” 😝
Except that’s not at all what they’ve built or what they’ve built towards. The whole point of Bluesky is that they separated hosting from moderation/censorship. Their goal is that individual users can select what they want to see or not see (which you may agree or disagree with as a design principle), which they’ve made great strides towards. I suggest you dig a bit deeper into how it works before you criticize it further :).
youre disingenuous. youre a talking point repeater for the purposes of marketing. no matter what legitimate criticisms of bluesky are pointed out, youll respond with “no thats not true. come check it out.” ended with an emoji. i wouldnt even be terribly surprised to learn you are a bot.
Alright, nice chatting with you 👍
I think bluesky _could_ be decentralized IN THEORY. They did design it with that in mind. But nobody has actually done it yet.
Yep, basically that. They can choose to push it in the future (eg if they run out of money), or might not. Given they’ve gone a lot of work towards it I assume they’ll at least try, subject to potentially limited budget. But in the mean time they added a lot of decentralized features that have lapped nostr in some domains (anyone can create a feed algorithm, even if it’s run centrally, is huge! Same for ban decisions being shared lists).
The question is, do we really accept that as good enough.
I disagree. Anything that is a “protocol” but has only one client isn’t a protocol or decentralized. It’s not intellectually lazy, it’s just true. The fact that censorship is possible at all is a contra facto against bluesky.
Meh, every protocol starts with one client. That doesn’t mean progress hasn’t been made (most of the backend stack can be self-hosted with all the same data as the “official” backend, except one part AFAIU, which required a lot of work), nor that more progress won’t be made. Yea, Bluesky has moderation, but that doesn’t mean it’s some centralized censored crap - especially if they manage to decentralize further and lean into the decentralized opt-in moderation design they have!
