this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2025
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I think at this point it's pretty clear that BlueSky is in the traditional social media business instead of being in the decentralized social media business.
Maybe that's a good decision for BlueSky, they certainly seem to have the growth at the moment, but I think we probably have to forget the dreams of it ever pushing the decentralization angle again.
I think that’s only because there are few, if any, bluesky instances
If not for the lack of decentralization, they'd be more decentralized.
Funny, but I haven’t heard of anyone starting new instances. Not sure why. Mastodon is more established?
I don't think anyone can host a relay right now aside from bluesky.
People can host their own data / Personal Data Server, which is somewhere between self-hosting a mastodon instance and creating an account on someone else's instance. The actual equivalent would be self-hosting your masto account separately from any instance (which is just not a thing with the current state of mastodon nor activity pub).
i love that bluesky just keeps getting away with it like this
"oh well they said people can run their own instances, so that must be true!"
nope, you just can't run a bluesky instance, can we please recognize this fact and stop giving the massive corporation the benefit of the doubt?
Not that I disagree with the spirit of what you're saying, but bluesky is not even close to a "massive" corporation. According to this they have a net worth of $7.23m, going as low as $600k in October last year. I know of plenty of local restaurants and other small businesses with a higher net worth than that.
There is only one instance, which is the company's, because the company has not released the server software. It's completely centralized.
It seems like both the data server (PDS) and the data aggregator (AppView) have been released:
https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds
What am I missing?
This got me curious, so I started digging into their documentation. It looks like you can currently stand up the appview backend as a local dev environment, but making it actually run as an alternative instance doesn't appear to be possible (which is why no one is doing it).
Well, then. That sucks