How decentralized is Bluesky really? -- Dustycloud Brainstorms

Recently due to various events (namely a lot of people getting off of X-Twitter), Bluesky has become a lot more popular, and excitement for its underlying protocol, ATProto, is growing. Since I worked on ActivityPub which connects together Mastodon, Sharkey, Peertube, GotoSocial, etc, etc, etc in the present-day fediverse, I often get asked whether or not I have opinions about ATProto vs ActivityPub, and the answer is that I do have opinions, but I am usually head-down focused on building what I hope to be the next generation of decentralized (social) networking tech, and so I keep to myself about such things except in private channels.

This debate has been growing harder to ignore, with articles ranging from "Bluesky is cosplaying decentralization" on the one hand and "Nobody cares about decentralization until they do" on the other (which I suppose went subscriber-only; it had a big splash recently and wasn't previously) in favor of ATProto and arguing that other approaches are not as decentralized. Still, I mostly believed that anything I had to say on the subject would not be received productively, and so I figured it was best to reserve comment to myself and those close to me. But recently I have received some direct encouragement from a core Bluesky developer that they have found my writings insightful and useful and would be happy to see me write on the subject. So here are my thoughts.

Let us open with a framing. Decentralization is the result of a system that diffuses power throughout its structure, so that no node holds particular power at the center. "Federation", as has been used as a technical term since the emergence of the "Fediverse" (which presently is mostly associated with ActivityPub, though I would argue XMPP and email are also federated), is a technical approach to communication architecture which achieves decentralization by many independent nodes cooperating and communicating to be a unified whole, with no node holding more power than the responsibility or communication of its parts.

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