Are we decentralized yet?

I did however, find this humorous anecdote:

> A Lotus executive later joked, "The first month we shipped 62,000 copies, and the following month we got 64,000 copies back. It was such a failure they sent us the bootlegged copies back."

https://www.forbes.com/2003/12/16/cx_el_macslide.html

That's not a thing. Market share has no time period. It's an instantaneous measure of the state of things right now. How many of your company's units are out in the wild right now being used, vs. how many total units (sold by any company) are out there in the wild right now being used.

That number can and will be different at different points of time, as people buy and return your products, and buy and return your competitors' products[0]. You can certainly say that your market share increased by 300% or by -40% over a given period of time, but your actual market share is always a number between 0% and 100%.

> Market share (for a given period) is the participant's sales in the market divided by total sales.

No, that's a company's share of sales as compared to the industry/product category as a whole. Not market share.

[0] You also should take into account people who throw your product in the trash (or for software, delete it) without returning it. Depending on context, you might even want to take into account people who put your product in a box in their basement and never use it again. Assuming you could actually divine those numbers, which of course you likely can't.

The squared sum of normalized shares proves to be very useful in a lot of contexts -- not just market share. Voting is one great example.

The expensive things in ATProto are the Relay (crawls/listens to PDSs to produce the firehose) and the AppView (keeps a DB of all posts/likes/etc to serve users' requests). Expensive at scale anyway; if you want your own small network for hosting non-Bluesky posts (like WhiteWind's longer character limit), the event volume will be manageable.

For a lot of stuff though ATProto is built in a way that you shouldn't have to host your own; you can implement your own algorithmic feed that reads from the Bluesky Relay's firehose, or your own frontend that still gets data from the Bluesky AppView.

Bluesky's architecture was pretty much dictated by the premise that anyone needs to be able to see any post on the entire system, regardless of whether they have any connections with the author. That algorithmic entertainment-style feeds need to exist. You do need that firehose and other expensive infrastructure for that, there's no going around it.

The fediverse, on the other hand, entirely relies on people following each other. Each server only receives and stores data that is relevant to its users. ActivityPub works like an automated email list management system. You follow someone, they start sending you their updates and forwarding any updates from others that they consider relevant, like replies to their posts.

One reason Bluesky is so successful is because it doesn't shove decentralisation into the user's face like Mastodon does. The vast majority of people don't know what decentralisation is and don't care to.

I think that far too much effort is put into decentralisation and not enough into good moderation on these platforms.

This isn't quite right. ATProto has a completely different "shape" so it's hard to make apples-to-apples comparison.

Roughly speaking, you can think of Mastodon as a bunch of little independently hosted copies of Twitter that "email" (loosely speaking) each other to propagate information that isn't on your server. So it's cheap to run a server for a bunch of friends but it's cut off from what's happening in the world. Your identity is tied to your server (that's your webapp), and when you want to follow someone on another server, your server essentially asks that other server to send stuff to yours. This means that by default your view of the network is extremely fragmented — replies, threads, like counts are all desynchronized and partial[1] depending on which server you're looking from and which information is being forwarded to it.

ATProto, on the other hand, is designed with a goal of actually being competitive with centralized services. This means that it's partitioned differently – it's not "many Twitters talking to each other" which is Mastodon's model. Instead, in ATProto, there is a separation of concerns: you have swappable hosting (your hosting is the source of truth for your data like posts, likes, follows, etc) and you have applications (which aggregate data from the former). This might remind you of traditional web: it's like every social media user posts JSON to "their own website" (i.e. hosting) while apps aggregate all that data, similar to how Google Reader might aggregate RSS. As a result, in ATProto, the default behavior is that everyone operates with a shared view of the world — you always see all replies, all comments, all likes are counted, etc. It's not partial by default.

With this difference in mind, "decentralizing" ATProto is sort of multidimensional. In Mastodon, the only primitive is an "instance" — i.e. an entire Twitter-like webapp you can host for your users. But in ATProto, there are multiple decentralized primitives:

- PDS (personal data hosting) is application-agnostic data store. Bluesky's implementation is open source (it uses sqlite database per user). There are also alternative implementations for the same protocol. Bluesky the company does operate the largest ones. However, running a PDS for yourself is extremely cheap (like maybe $1/mo?). It's basically just a structured KV JSON storage organized as a Merkle tree. A bit like Git hosting.

- AppViews are actual "application backends". Bluesky operates the bsky.app appview, i.e. what people know as the Bluesky app. Importantly, in ATProto, there is no reason for everyone to run their own AppView. You can run one (and it costs about $300/mo to run a Bluesky AppView ingesting all data currently on the network in real time if you want to do that). Of course, if you were happy with tradeoffs chosen by Mastodon (partial view of the network, you only see what your servers' users follow), you could run that for a lot cheaper — so that's why I'm saying it's not apples-to-apples. ATProto makes it easy to have an actually cohesive experience on the network but the costs are usually being compared with fragmented experience of Mastodon. ATProto can scale down to Mastodon-like UX (with Mastodon-like costs) but it's just not very appealing when you can have the real thing.

- Relays are things "in between" PDS's and AppViews. Essentially a Relay is just an optimization to avoid many-to-many connections between AppViews and PDS's. A Relay just rebroadcasts updates from all PDS's as a single stream (that AppViews can subscribe to). Running a Relay used to be expensive but it got a lot cheaper since "Sync 1.1" (when a change in protocol allowed Relays to be non-archiving). Now it costs about $30/mo to run a Relay.

So all in all, running PDSs and Relays is cheap. Running full AppViews is more expensive but there's simply no equivalent to that in the Mastodon world because Mastodon is always fragmented[1]. And running a partial AppView (comparable to Mastodon behavior) should be much, much cheaper — but also not very appealing so I don't know anyone who's actually doing that. (It would also require adding a bit of code to filter out the stuff you don't care about.)

[1] Mastodon is adding a workaround for this with on-demand fetching, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45078133 for my questions about that; in any case, this is limited by what you can do on-demand in a pull-based decentralized system.

But since essentially no one is using it doesn’t suggest much avoidance of centralization. These factors are not independent. It’s pretty easy to avoid anything when your total user count is a rounding error compared to the alternatives.

It's important to note that this isn't "you have to be big in order to be able to filter spam". That's not true at all; decentralized anti-spam lists have been a thing for decades and the big sites don't have any significant advantage in filtering spam.

It's allegedly that big sites will mark small sites as spam even when they're not, which makes it hard to run a small mail server. And there is some of that -- they also have a perverse incentive to do it on purpose because it kills their smaller competitors.

But it's also somewhat overstated. If you have a reverse DNS entry pointing back at your mail server and have properly configured DKIM, it's not inherently the case that you're always going to be marked as spam. And it's not inherently the case that you won't just because you use one of the big services -- they have the same incentive to do that to each other, after all.

Sure, a lot of people pick one center and stare at it. But there are plenty of centers and that situation is getting better recently. Some even integrate git with ATProto or ActivityPub.

There are loads of different tracker sites. Many private. If one goes bad, others pop up to replace it. This is decentralised - there is not one player that strangles the ecosystem.

(Never used the fediverse, so zero context here).

I disagree that building economics into the protocol is the way forward. There's so much power and creativity that can be unlocked when the substrate is free.

NNTP is also great but most people can not afford individually to mirror entire binary groups and most ISP's no longer perform this so most people just use commercial news feeds if they want binaries or one of the free NNTP / Usenet providers if they are just using text. People can certainly peer with some of the free providers [1] and probably should to reduce the risk of people being censored. Much like IRC people can create their own little private or semi-private linked NNTP servers to replicate a distributed thread based forum of sorts.

[1] - https://www.eternal-september.org/index.php?showpage=peering

You can think of the golden age of blogs and search as an example of both. Search engines formed a centralized hub with blogs, forums, etc. forming the spokes. For a while that worked well before it was degraded by spam and consolidation of disparate forums etc. into a handful of major platforms (fueled partly be acquisitions).

Fediverse is almost straight left, and it's already 690. Straight up would be 5000. This is non-linear scale presented linearly.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook tries to eventually capture that data with Threads.

it would be high in my list of desirability because decentralization means agency to move freely.

i like the fact that if i find the city or state i live in to be boring or economically terrible, i can move.

i like it that if i don’t like the food or atmosphere of a restaurant, i can go to a different restaurant.

i like that if i think billy is a constant asshole, me and my friends can move to the next table over and leave billy behind.

social networks are absolutely no different, no matter how hard certain people try to convince online is different, it isn’t.

we should be soooo incredibly leery of anyone who tells us it’s a good thing to have no agency to eat different food or go party at a different bar.

the hair on the back of our neck should stand up every time someone tries to convince us to go to only a couple of places with the same set of rulers and tries to convince us this is somehow good for us.

how many times have you heard “you want to avoid echo chambers” followed by “therefor everyone should all be on the exact same set of websites with the same set of rulers” followed by “anything less than everyone on the same site is a failure”

it’s double speak: if you are not trapped here, you have an echo chamber.

freedom of movement, freedom of association, etc… are incredibly important to the future health of the internet.

I wonder if people would actually migrate or if they'd just get boiled.

But, yes I agree with you :)

Additionally, since ATProto decouples hosting of data from hosting of applications, there is no such things as "instances" having beefs and defederating from each other. The data flows one way (from PDS to apps). Apps may choose to ban certain PDS's but generally PDS's themselves are treated as app-agnostic containers of data. So intra-network social beefs don't translate to technological cutoff or loss of mobility. Social groups and communities are decoupled from hosting.

This happened to me with julialang.social which just stopped running after the guy hired to host it was poached by Google and he lost all interest in the Julia language community. Lost everything. Not going to look back at activitypub as ATProto is the future for me.

They just disappear. You're not appending to a long-term immutable blockchain-like archive. You're posting things to the internet and the nature of posting things to the internet (or anywhere for that matter) is that nobody guarantees they will be around forever.

> Or what about those times when entire instances get involved in dramas and end up defederating

Identical to "what about those times when Twitter bans someone whose tweets I want to read?"

> What all this talk about fighting censorship while actively engaging

Censorship and moderation are the same word

Good analogy. When Twitter started, I took one look at people shouting "I had a delicious sandwich today" and "I just took an amazing dump" and wanted no part of it. When it later turned into a "clever" contest, I wanted even less.

My quiet little Mastodon community, plus some outsiders I have chosen, is the kind of "social" I want. If someone starts behaving like an influencer, they get muted.

The very second most people need to think about implementation details, like what instance is connected to what instance and what that means, they're done. It's not like they couldn't understand it if they tried: they don't want to try because they don't care. In fact, they don't want to care.

What they care about is interacting with their friends and family and celebrity personas that amuse them, and also get some news handed to them that fits their world view. They don't want to have a little independent social network-- they want to connect with whoever they want to connect with and access whoever they want to access and any barrier to that makes it worse for them. The centralization is the selling point for a lot of those people. Being at the terminal point in a federated service, as they exist, makes all of that harder. It makes it harder for great reasons but they're reasons that most people don't even want to care about. They trade good, easy experiences with the things that are important to them for things they never wanted and have no interest in learning about. Nerds get a kick out of being on a decentralized social network. Most people absolutely do not care. It's not like they don't want to be: it just doesn't matter to them, so if they have to give literally anything up to achieve that, it's too high of a cost.

It's almost like trying to get people to switch from mobile phones to amateur radio.

E-mail is really ingenious. It doesn't even define how to send and receive messages in the same standard. One standard is just for delivering messages; you have to figure out how you're going to receive them separately.

Of course most people have an e-mail address hosted by one of a handful of large companies. But you don't have to. And if you buy your own domain, changing providers is easy. Delete your old mail on the old server, upload it to the new server, people can still contact you the same way they did before.

I'm not on social media, so I don't have any dog in this fight. But all the properties of a good decentralized/federated platform are already there in decades-old protocols.

In the real world, you can ask people if they would prefer to live in a town with all bespoke mom'n'pop businesses or just a few big box retailers and chain restaurants identical to the ones in the next town over. The intuitive expectation might be that most people would prefer the bespoke stuff because it offers a more personalized service, but it turns out that many people really do want to have the same experience as folks in the next town over. Even among folks who claim to be free thinkers or unique personalities, even among folks who have xenophobia or express a chavinistic sentiment, there is still an impulse to seek the exact same experiences that folks outside of their community are also having. Why is that?

I am sure there are various psychological and perhaps even physiological reasons why people are drawn to homogeneity, but the bigger problem is that bad actors can find ways to exploit these reasons to amass power. Once those actors have the power to shape society, then it becomes a feedback loop where perhaps in the abstract a person might not desire exactly those experiences that are provided by the central authority, but because the structures in society are now pointing toward that being the "best" option, then that's what people come to believe they want.

I suppose the philosophical question is if people come to want to be exploited, is it still okay to exploit them? Personally I think it's not okay. I think it's a worthy goal to present other options. In an ideal world, perhaps there would be structures in society that define open standards that allow people to find the homogeneous experiences they value while still ensuring that no central authority could take ownership over the delivery of those experiences. Perhaps there should be some assurance that those who deliver the experiences aren't also using other levers at their disposal to engineer the desire for those experiences in the first place.

Which is all to say that perhaps social media should be better regulated, and as nerds we might think that one way to do that is build it into the base technology as decentralization or federation. But one would hope that people outside of tech could at least understand the value, since the tech is just a model of real-world systems.

The chicken and egg problem is that users go where the content is, and content goes where users are.

In reality what this means is that the vast majority of both users and content tend towards a single solution, and that is where there is the least friction, aka the path of least reesistance.

Monetary incentives and various perks (features, first mover advantage, ...) can help but overall it seems to tend towards ease of use.

For users, TikTok is the king for a reason: EVERY SINGLE SWIPE (caps because I want to intentionally put a LOT of emphasis on this) is content that YOU, specifically YOU, are likely interested in. If not, the very next swipe is likely to be what your brain thinks is good, because the algorithm is so good it already knows what you want. Yeah, I know, that's because they spy on their users, whatever, sadly users do not care about that.

BlueSky? Even if you follow specific users, content discovery is so, so much harder. But the main problem is that the vast majority of users, especially new ones, will be subjected to subpar content compared to other platforms.

So why should a new user come back there instead of literally anywhere else? And if there are no users, why put the content there, and if there is no content, there are no users, and so on...

Notice how in all of this the underlying architecture has quite literally no relevance and is nothing but a technical detail.

> Hell, I would even say that threads is the biggest mastodon instance.

So is Truth Social. But they are not federated with the rest.

Until the platform enshittifies like Reddit and Twitter did.

People outside tech very much do care about the effects of centralization, though. They complain about it constantly, in oblique terms.

All the waxing poetic about "social media"? They aren't mad that people talk to each other. They're mad at platforms.

They just don't recognize the root cause of their pain points until they're sufficiently technical.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy

The article cites a few notable counterexamples like Wikipedia. Your post looks like learned helplessness.