How decentralized is Bluesky really?

November 23, 2024

Here’s an excellent article from Christine Lemmer-Webber that takes a deeper technical look into some of the criticisms I had in my previous piece.

The article is long, but very much worth a read. From the conclusion:

Bluesky is built by good people who care, and it is providing something that people desperately want and need. If you are looking for a Twitter replacement, you can find it in Bluesky today.

However, I stand by my assertions that Bluesky is not meaningfully decentralized and that it is certainly not federated according to any technical definition of federation we have had in a decentralized social network context previously. To claim that Bluesky is decentralized or federated in its current form moves the goalposts of both of those terms, which I find unacceptable.

I agree completely. It’s not that Bluesky isn’t building something interesting. While I find the tech stack slightly over-complicated, it’s really novel and there are some great ideas at play. However, I find it irksome when the system is lauded as “federated” or “decentralized”. It doesn’t have to be either of those things to be a cool thing to build!

I’ve been using Bluesky more over the past week, and have been digging into the API and backend details a bit more. It’s mind-boggling (and slightly scary) what’s possible with a system this radically open. Hopefully more on that soon.

The service feels fun and exciting at the moment! Growth has slowed a bit, but people are still joining at crazy clip. I’m reconnected with a lot of folks who never made it to Mastodon, and I plan to continue using both platforms for the foreseeable future.