I can’t believe the guy who originally administered the creation of Twitter would do all the exact same things that originally made him billions of dollars selling the company to Elon Musk.
There’s no way he’s just speed-running what he did last time in hopes of another $44B buyout.
Bluesky, the decentralized social network […]
Were only one instance exist or did I miss something?
As I understand it, the protocol has the ability to decentralize built in. But the technical requirements are prohibitively high to the point only large businesses or corps could afford to do it. I also believe (someone correct me) the company hasn’t switched on the functionality yet.
Last heard (a few months ago) the cost is in storage. The protocol isn’t too complicated now, but it generates a shit ton of data, and IIRC you need a minimum of 3 copies.
Storage is cheap whwn it comes to webhosting and 3 replicas is honestly not much when it comes to enterprise standards. I think cloud storage providers like backblaze keep something like 9 copies of data across different mediums
The biggest thing is that you need to be manually authorized by them for federation. They will only ever federate with servers that arent serious enough competition to lead to democratization of the overall network.
No, PDS federation is fully open now.
They’re also actively supporting development of 3rd party appviews and relays.
The power dynamic is still 1000000:1 they can do whatever they want and you will have to follow. If they defederate you, there is no value in your self hosted instance.
Nope, it’s 100% centralized.
It’s 100% centralized, but with the ability to be decentralized. Sorta like Threads before they started federating
The “ability” to decentralize has costs that scale quadratically. So in every practical sense, it cannot be decentralized. At best it could have a few servers that participate.
No, it doesn’t scale “quadratically”. That’s what going viral on Mastodon does to a small instance, not on bluesky. Pretty much everything scales linearly. The difference is certain components handle a larger fraction of the work (appview and relay).
Both a bluesky appview and a Mastodon instance scales by the size of the userbase which it interacts with. Mastodon likes to imagine that the userbase will always be consistent, but it isn’t. Anything viewed by a large part of the whole Mastodon network forces the host to serve the entirety of the network and all its interactions. So does a bluesky appview, in just the same way, but they acknowledge this upfront.
Meanwhile, you CAN host a bluesky PDS account host and have your traffic scale only by the rate of your users’ activity + number of relays you push these updates to. Going viral doesn’t kill your bandwidth.
I can’t speak to how traffic costs and mastodon works, but this article explains how having multiple blue skies federating with each other scales quadratically. https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/ it is very thorough.
In fact, it is worse than the storage requirements, because the message delivery requirements become quadratic at the scale of full decentralization: to send a message to one user is to send a message to all. Rather than writing one letter, a copy of that letter must be made and delivered to every person on earth
That’s written assuming the edge case of EVERYBODY running a full relay and appview, and that’s not per-node scaling cost but global scaling cost.
Because they don’t scale like that, global cost is geometric instead (for every full relay and appview, there’s one full copy with linear scaling to network activity), and each server only handles the cost for serving their own users’ activity (plus firehose/jetstream subscription & filtering for those who need it)
For Mastodon instance costs, try ask the former maintainers of https://botsin.space/
I’m sad that bots in space had to spin down, but there are still bots on Mastodon. One server quitting didn’t take everything down.
The part where if a mastodon post gets popular, it has to serve that to everyone makes sense because it’s kind of like a website. Maybe there could be a CDN like Cloudflare that a mastodon server could use to cache responses?
The part about Bluesky that doesn’t sound good to me is “to send a message to one user is to send it to all”. Wouldn’t this be crazy with even 100 servers for 10000 users, vs 2 servers with 5000 each? Not sure how the math works but it doesn’t look good if they have to duplicate so much traffic.
I think their initial selling point was that Eventually©®™ Bluesky would federate with the rest of the Fediverse.
Is anybody really surprised that a social media corporation didn’t make it their utmost priority to allow their userbase to connect out of their proprietary platform?
They never said they’d do so natively with other protocols - but they support Bridgy, so you already can do that.
Then come over to Mastodon…
Anyone who is surprised that BlueSky is going down the same path as Twitter (X, not withstanding) belongs on BlueSky.
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He’s already sold Twitter/X to xAI; he’s got his arse covered when the bottom eventually falls out.
Good thing AI can’t fail.
Oh, no doubt - but he’s no longer personally on the hook for Twitter’s $44b debt-loan!
So when it eventually fails, it’ll be a corporate write-off and Elon’s wealth across Tesla and SpaceX are protected.
Wait is that what happened? Investors in his AI company are on the hook for Twitter now?
The rich really are a vampiric class.
Yes, that’s what happened: https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2025/03/28/elon-musk-says-xai-has-purchased-x-formerly-known-as-twitter-for-33-billion/
For what it’s worth, xAI is still a private company - so at least it’s not retail investors on the hook, just venture capital.
I think a few more people “get it” every time the cycle repeats, but also, a sucker is born every minute.
The checkmark is the wrong approach. You should never trust accounts, because accounts get hacked. We should instead use cryptographic signatures on individual posts, and clients can warn when that signature doesn’t match the account’s public key, or if that key changed recently. The private key would never live on the server, and ideally live outside the app.
This doesn’t verify identity, it just proves the key didn’t change. To establish identity, the person needs to use the same key in multiple places, such as posting it on a personal website or something. If a service wants to add their own stamp of approval, they can sign these public keys and embed them into the apl for clients to use (e.g. show a blue checkmark if Bluesky can verify the public key outside its system).
If the private key is compromised, repeat the process, potentially signing the new key with both the old and new key to prove control of both (or start from scratch if needed). Repeat whenever they get hacked.
Average user:
“Wait how do I get cryptocurrency with my key?”
This is a great idea.
It’s also not new. GPG has been around for decades, and is pretty much this.
Bluesky is the new X. After canceling the accounts of Turkish protesters this is the next step for the big money behind Bluesky. That’s why I deleted my account a few days ago.
What’s the story with the Turkish protesters?
The way the article describes Turkey and the press is the same thing that’s been happening in the US with the legacy (state funded) media. Hopefully, that’s changing now though.
Bluesky has basically bowed to the Turkish regime: https://www.turkishminute.com/2025/04/17/bluesky-restrict-access-72-account-turk-amid-government-pressure/
Same. Deleted my account when they started to censor the Turkish protestors. Not that I used the account really but still.
Exactly, Bluesky has been shitty for a while for lots of reasons. I’m not understanding why this is the line in the sand.
I do not see anything to be angry or disappointed about?
Verification badge was good, the dumb thing Twitter did was throw it away by letting anyone pay for it.
Nah it was not good. Domain names already do that and are accessible to all at all times with full transparency and decentralization. Bluesky is literally regressing.
Even mastodon’s verification system is better than checkmarks.
domain names do that for people with well known domain names, and verification processes do that for people without
Yup. Need something like EV certs to really verify… And that would only make sense if it’s a “no (non-real) screennames” kind of thing.
i think the .id.au domain licensing rules are a pretty reasonable middle-ground:
https://www.auda.org.au/au-domain-names/the-different-au-domain-names/id-au-domain-names/
The id.au domain name you choose must match or be an acronym or abbreviation of your first name or family name, or your nickname
you have to provide ID to register any .au, so you’re verified as a person, and though they don’t pre-check your nickname, AFAIK if there’s a complaint you do have to prove that you’re “known by” that name
If the same authority is doing verification that is also doing moderation and both ultimately in a for profit setting, that has conflict of interest.
We dont know how reliable bluesky moderation will stay. We dont know how they will respond to political pressure. We dont know how they will monetize past the growth phase and then could also argue a “service fee” for verification.
In a perfect world none of these would happen, but then everybody could still be on twitter and be fine there.
No one disliked the check mark before “Genghis Kunt” started selling it
It was selectively given to institutions and “major” celebrities before that.
Selling them dilutes any meaning of “verified” because any joe can just pay for extra engagement. It’s a perverse incentive, as the people most interest in grabbing attention buy it and get amplified.
It really has little to do with Musk.
So long as the checkmark isn’t bought through some subscription service, I’m fine with this.
The whole reason why verification exists is because other will steal the name of someone famous and masquerade as them, with real world consequences. A verification system now means that certain platforms and people will get more attracted to be there, and thus Bluesky will grow.
Yeah I deleted my Bluesky. All public companies eventually turn to shit because of the shareholders unending greed.
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Something like this unavoidable.
Example, ted cruz the car mechanic in marfa Texas has just has much right to use blusky as
professional shit bagsenator ted cruz. But hiw do tell the real one from the racid sack of weasels.It’s easy: cryptographic signatures. If you want to prove your identify, post a public key on something that you need to prove identity for (personal website or something) and sign your posts with the same key. That way everyone can tell the that the same key listed on the website is used for SM posts. Clients can check this automatically and flag anything on your “official” account that’s signed with a different key.
This is much better than a checkmark system, because accounts get hacked and whatnot. It’s really easy to check a cryptographic signature, and it’s really hard to fake. If the website gets hacked, the signature won’t match previous posts.
The main concern here is losing the key. If someone steals your key, generate a new one, and sign it with the old key and the new one. Boom, now everyone can tell you control both keys, while the attacker only controls the old one.
That’s only easy for nerds, and it doesn’t help if the private key is on a device that gets compromised.
Regular people wouldn’t need identity verification, and the keys can be something the user never sees, just like with Signal. The UX can be pretty good here.
But how would a user see that this poat was made with the right crypto key. Maybe some check mark on the Post or some sign.
Ideally, they wouldn’t see anything if everything is good. If there’s an anomaly, flag it with a warning.
But yeah, you could put a checkmark on it, but then it actually means something more than “this person spent money.” Ideally, the checkmark would only show if it’s a publicly verifiable key outside the platform.
Yeah that’s a better system then. We need something that shows the user then post or user is verified. How it works doesn’t matrer to them. Amd the key system would be betterment
Preaching to the choir
But anyway anyone who thinks bluesky is actually decentralised will learn sooner rather than later that that’s not the case
Figured they would go down this route. Don’t use it anyway
you don’t kill a cow for a scratch on her leg (I hope the saying is understandable for everybody since it doesn’t come from English).
I’m on mastodon and bluesky: the first is even less populated than here and a big part of the interesting content comes from bot reposting popular accounts from x or reddit, while the second is far from being THE solution but it’s nowadays a -not wildly populated- compromise. I don’t condone (while I understand) the Turkish bans and I’m not interested in a verification system: if I’d like one, I’d use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EIDAS.
I hope bluesky will correct its approach for what they can (the “good old” twitterin the golden era was banned in Turkey)I don’t understand - do you think mastodon (or the fediverse in general) is sparsely populated? That’s not my impression at all!
That’s exactly what I meant: very few people, only on main niches, and some political and lifestyle ideas are common to 90% of the userbase (ie: anti-Trump, pro-Palestine, pro-Foss, etc).
I’m not complaining, just reporting what I seeIt seems that you don’t curate your followers much and/or don’t follow many people. The timeline is what you make it to be by following a variety of people as there isn’t an algoritm to curate it for you. There’s plenty of interesting content circling around and it’s wholly up to you wether it makes it to your timeline or not.
I get it, but I don’t want to curate my followers, I’m not a news media, I just follow users I totally like, I usually look for content I don’t see in my timeline, do a lot of surfing, but in the end it’s not that big as today
I believe the equivalent saying would be “don’t let perfect be the enemy of good”.
I couldn’t give a single shit about these twitter alternatives, because the whole concept is stupid.
the whole concept is stupid.
+1
Being that algorithmic just makes any Twitter-like design too easy to abuse.
Again, Lemmy (and Reddit) is far from perfect, but fundamentally, grouping posts and feeds by niche is way better. It incentivizes little communities that are concerned about their own health, while users have zero control over that shouting into the Twitter maw.
yea lemmy/reddit definitely seems like more of a sweet spot. with twitter/mastodon or anything that has a “say something” text box right in your face on every page, you are going to end up with a lot of noise, because most people just dont have interesting things to say most of the time
