Haven't we learned by now that approximately no one cares? Centralised services are vastly more popular than federated ones, the main reason being that they reduce the paradox / paralysis of choice when you're signing up for them. (Solve that problem properly and you may be on to something.)
The issue is that relays tend to require a lot more resources to operate than appviews and PDSes (though not necessarily as much as that blog post suggests; I recall posts of people running their own relays on RPi4s with NVMe drives), so it's common for alternative appviews to rely on Bluesky's relay instead of taking on the expense of spinning up a new one.
In any case, as that toot notes, the Bluesky outage was on a PDS level rather than a relay level. And thankfully it's much less expensive to run your own PDS; apparently those who do so weren't impacted.
The genie is already out of the bottle for thirty years, and it's called the open web. Luckily I don't need half the world's population to agree upon and use something that already exists out there.
Keep posting on your website and keep linking. It's called the 'web' for a reason.
i don’t actively contribute to Bluesky nor Fedi (i do consume content from both), but it’s pretty frustrating to see BlueSky being argued into a centralized service for the recent downtime.
- The downtime was not relay level, but it was a PDS level. So the point is moot already.
- Because it was decentralized at the PDS level, the outage did not affect anyone with personal PDSes, which contains the data that you care about.
- Even if it was the relay level, relays aren’t centralized, anyone can spin up another relay (because everything on the relay is derived from PDS data). It’s just that it’s going to be pretty expensive and consume much resources. Which is a fair point, and might be argued that the network currently has a single big point of failure, but that doesn’t mean it’s centralized.
And then people now start arguing that the fact that BlueSky-hosted PDSes went down at the same time is now another proof that BlueSky is centralized?
That’s like arguing that Gmail can go down and all @gmail.com mail addresses won’t work, so email is centralized. Or AWS can have an outage and all AWS-powered websites will break down, so the web is centralized.
One can say that there’s a single big point of failure (which the BlueSky LLC is, just like AWS, Gmail, or the mastodon.social instance in the case of Fedi), but that doesn’t make the whole service centralized.
I used to not care about centralized or decentralized services, I just wanted to best product.
Now I see how each of the major social media networks has been involved in censorship of Israel's genocide in Palestine (including btw HN), it makes me realize how important decentralization is.
I think a lot of Americans (and other countries who have essentially handed over their media to US social media companies) are going to learn same lessons soon, as Trump starts to leverage the existing censorship tools more broadly.
Apparently Bluesky has one centralized service, the "relay"
(mastodon.online)106 points by doener 26 April 2025 | 79 comments
Comments
The issue is that relays tend to require a lot more resources to operate than appviews and PDSes (though not necessarily as much as that blog post suggests; I recall posts of people running their own relays on RPi4s with NVMe drives), so it's common for alternative appviews to rely on Bluesky's relay instead of taking on the expense of spinning up a new one.
In any case, as that toot notes, the Bluesky outage was on a PDS level rather than a relay level. And thankfully it's much less expensive to run your own PDS; apparently those who do so weren't impacted.
Keep posting on your website and keep linking. It's called the 'web' for a reason.
Wait, how did a decentralized service like Bluesky go down? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43789178 - April 2025 (2 comments)
- The downtime was not relay level, but it was a PDS level. So the point is moot already.
- Because it was decentralized at the PDS level, the outage did not affect anyone with personal PDSes, which contains the data that you care about.
- Even if it was the relay level, relays aren’t centralized, anyone can spin up another relay (because everything on the relay is derived from PDS data). It’s just that it’s going to be pretty expensive and consume much resources. Which is a fair point, and might be argued that the network currently has a single big point of failure, but that doesn’t mean it’s centralized.
And then people now start arguing that the fact that BlueSky-hosted PDSes went down at the same time is now another proof that BlueSky is centralized?
That’s like arguing that Gmail can go down and all @gmail.com mail addresses won’t work, so email is centralized. Or AWS can have an outage and all AWS-powered websites will break down, so the web is centralized.
One can say that there’s a single big point of failure (which the BlueSky LLC is, just like AWS, Gmail, or the mastodon.social instance in the case of Fedi), but that doesn’t make the whole service centralized.
Now I see how each of the major social media networks has been involved in censorship of Israel's genocide in Palestine (including btw HN), it makes me realize how important decentralization is.
I think a lot of Americans (and other countries who have essentially handed over their media to US social media companies) are going to learn same lessons soon, as Trump starts to leverage the existing censorship tools more broadly.