Reply on Bluesky and Decentralization
This is a reply to Christine Lemmer-Webber's thoughtful (and widely read) "How decentralized is Bluesky really?" blog post.
I am so happy and grateful that Christine took the time to write up her thoughts and put them out in public. Her writing sheds light on substantive differences between protocols and projects, and raises the bar on analysis in this space.
This response is split up in a few sections. The first talks about architecture and large infrastructure. The second gets into goals, and the third touches on specific terminology ("federated" and "decentralized"). Following sections confirm identified challenges, pick a couple nits, some thoughts on trust, and wrap up.
Bluesky's mission is to build tools for "open and decentralized public conversation". Global visibility, discovery, and interactions with strangers and remote organizations are essential functionality.
Christine makes the distinction between "message passing" systems (email, XMPP, and ActivityPub) and "shared heap" systems (atproto). Yes! They are very different in architecture, which will likely have big impacts on outcomes and network structure. Differences like this make "VHS versus BetaMax" analogies inaccurate.
