Free Our Feeds: "it will take independent funding and governance to turn Bluesky’s underlying tech—the AT Protocol—into something more powerful than a single app"

Arthur Besse@lemmy.ml · 2 days ago

Free Our Feeds: "it will take independent funding and governance to turn Bluesky’s underlying tech—the AT Protocol—into something more powerful than a single app"

Blaze (he/him)@feddit.org · 2 days ago

The only hard part to run is the relay.

So what prevents the relay from being bought by a billionaire, who would then decide on the content of the output?

Blisterexe@lemmy.zip · 2 days ago

you can just run another one, currently nobody does but if the main relay gets bought out, the community can band together to run one, it’s a couple hundred bucks a month, expensive, but not unsustainable.

moonpiedumplings@programming.dev · 2 days ago

Decentralized in theory, but not in practice is just centralized.

Also:

So how challenging is it to run those? In July 2024, running a Relay on ATProto already required 1 terabyte of storage. But more alarmingly, just a four months later in November 2024, running a relay now requires approximately 5 terabytes of storage

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

Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works · 2 days ago

Aren’t the top few lemmy servers about that much to run?

Blaze (he/him)@feddit.org · 1 day ago

No, instances can be run by enthusiasts and keep operating based on donations

https://feddit.org/post/2600584

The likely answer to this is that there will always have to be a large corporation at the heart of Bluesky/ATProto, and the network will have to rely on that corporation to do the work of abuse mitigation, particularly in terms of illegal content and spam. This may be a good enough solution for Bluesky’s purposes, but on the economics alone it’s going to be a centralized system that relies on trusting centralized authorities.

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