Technology

For those who don't know, Bluesky isn't really federated. The only way to host a non-Bluesky instance required 1TB of storage in July 2024, and 5 TB of storage in Nov 2024. Could be way more than that now.

You basically have to be a company to federate into the ATProto (Bluesky) ecosystem. You can't just "stand up an instance".

Lots of detail: https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

(I know you've already realized that you were conflating Mastodon with Bluesky, I'm putting this here for others who come along so they can get the facts).

They're still a corporate entity, and they still want access to markets to make money.

Assuming you are serious:

Bluesky is ... arguably 'federated', but it is centralized, not decentralized.

https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20241128-bluesky-decentralization

Their model (AT Protocol) relies on a central, authoritative ... 'Relay', that all 'federated' users and posts on federated PDS (personal data servers) must go through, to actually reach the 'AppView', ie, what all other people/users can actually see.

So, this is not a many to many, tangled spider web of connections, the way lemmy, and other parts of the actual fediverse are.

It is a top down hierarchy, a pyramid.

And Bluesky runs the Relay, the chokepoint.

If Bluesky cuts off the PDS your account is on, everyone on it is now gone.

The actual fediverse, Mastadon, Lemmy, etc, runs on ActivityPub.

In that model... every instance is essentially self contained, and every instance that is federated communicates with every other instance that is federated.

Each instance can decide what other instances they want to federate with... and users on each instance can personally block even more other users, communities, or entire instances if they choose to, but that only effects what that particular user sees.

That is what you call decentralized, approaching, or also having elements of being 'distributed'.

To bring up an example without getting into the drama that led to it:

The 'Tankie Triad' of ml, lemmygrad and hexbear have had a number of other instances defederate from them.

But, there are also a good number of instances that have not done so.

So that means if your account is on hexbear... you can't see or post on an instamce that has blocked your instance.

But, if you (a hexbear...ian?), post on a neutral instance... users on that neutral instance will see the post.

But but, if a user from an instance that has defederated from hexbear goes to to the neutral instance... they will not see the hexbearian's post.

This sounds complicated, and it is, but ... thats the whole point of a decentralized system. It is more complex in the abstract... but the entire system ends up being more robust, more adaptable, more customizable... without a central authority in direct control of the entire system.

I will share the same shock the day I see that 16 out of 15 posts on Nostr are not related to Bitcoin or using Nostr.

let's hope they stop at that and don't give out their info like yahoo did before for china and other oppressive governments

It was an obvious op from the beginning. You could tell by the people they were trotting out to sell it. Lots of liberal pro-authority types.

I sort of feel like that's not really relevant. How would being decentralised make any difference, the government would just go after the server owners regardless of who they are. If the server owners didn't honour the takedown requests turkey would just ban the server IP and no one would be able to access.

Federation isn't a solution to every problem

Honestly at this point I want to host a distributed Lemmy instance and completely ignore all country laws in favor of complete and absolute freedom of speech.

It might sound extreme, but pretty sure at this point I'd be willing to die for it given the state of global politics.

Where is bluesky based? As far as I know you have to follow the laws of where you are based. Otherwisse we'd have to follow the lowest common denominator, like north korea, or afghanistan or the like

Remove one Turk from the service or remove the entire service from Turkey?

Essentially the question Bluesky executives had to make here.