Maybe Bluesky has "won" (Technical blog post on Bluesky vs others)

November 15, 2024

November has sucked so far. One upside of the terrible nonsense is that more people are fleeing X. Many are choosing Bluesky. I’ve seen a bunch of takes about this recently, but I keep seeing things I disagree with. I figure that’s a good enough excuse to write more about this weird-assed social network.

Decentralized? Federated? Neither.
When writing about Bluesky, I’ve seen folks mention that it’s either federated or decentralized. I’m here to tell you that it’s currently neither. This one really irks me because the service is getting the credit for work it hasn’t done.

One problem here is that the whole “decentralized” thing is complicated. I believe the Bluesky team is putting in a lot of good-faith effort to becoming a decentralized platform. But, this work is tricky because their architectural choices are quite novel.

As I’ve written previosuly, the AT Protocol (atproto) that powers Bluesky is really complex. It’s made up of three main parts: Personal Data Servers (PDSs), Relays, and App Views.

SNIP

Maybe Bluesky has “won”
I don’t know what the social media landscape will look like in 6 months, but I’d bet things will change. If Bluesky comes out as a “winner” and more posting happens there, I think I’m generally fine with that. At least for now.

The whole Twitter mess has taught me not to attach myself too closely with these things anymore. I hung on far too long to Twitter while it made me feel terrible. My goal going forward is to post more to my own site and aggregate to any social channel I currently care about. I’m happy to interact on any that I’m a part of, but I’m also going to be much quicker to pull the ripcord if things start going down hill.

Full blog post
https://anderegg.ca/2024/11/15/maybe-bluesky-has-won