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Top-level
 @cwebber Writing a response to this while acknowledging that you're not done with the thread yet. I think the pro-bsky view is that "just" hosting a PDS counts as data independence. If this is true, then Bsky has the additional advantage (vs GTS) of shrinking outgoing bandwidth costs to something viable for hosting a few thousand users. They'd argue that hosting a relay isn't necessary because the "god's eye" view you talk about is really just the one true unopinionated view of the network. /3 4 comments
@cwebber But I think you're right that this starts to come apart at the seams. In fact, as you pointed out, the relay isn't neutral. It deletes spam and removes illegal content. That's important not just because of the operating costs, but because it means that the headcanon one-true-AT-network doesn't really exist; what exists is something much more centralized and hard to duplicate. I don't have a good response to this. I think if you want relay independence, Bsky isn't likely to cut it. One thing I didn't think to say in the above is that you can imagine a distributed ledger for did:plc and the relay - which doesn't currently exist. If one did exist, then there would be a practical way to keep Bluesky honest. Bsky proponents seem to think that Bluesky is meant to behave *as if* did:plc and the relay were like this, and if they start misbehaving you can fork the network. But the fact that Bsky doesn't, and *can't*, be neutral throws a wrench into this. I would summarize my view by saying that Bsky is semi-decentralized but NOT federated. It's a model of publishing akin to RSS, with the AppView serving as Google Reader / Feedly equivalent. And like Feedly / Inoreader, Bsky adds a bunch of *centralized* features on top of "RSS", which complicates the term "decentralized". The problem for Bsky is that RSS is not a social network, and the most "social" of Bsky's features (e.g. global search, DMs) are therefore the most centralized. |
Gregory's Server
@cwebber This is different from e.g. Google because Google offers an opionated view of the web. The Bsky appview is more Google Reader than Google Search (as you've pointed out).
I think the "headcanon" is that anyone can make their own relay (or even did:plc maybe) because these are thought of as (caching) dumb pipes to the underlying data. There's no *reason* to run an alternate relay so long as the official one acts as a free dumb pipe, and the possibility of making one keeps them honest. /3