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How decentralized is Bluesky really? (dustycloud.org)

submitted 1 month ago by garretble@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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This is a pretty great, long form post about the structure of Bluesky, and how it's largely kinda pretending to be decentralized at the moment. I'm not trying to make a dig at it. I've enjoyed the platform myself for a while, but it's good to learn more about how it actually works.

This article was shared on Mastodon via its author here.

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[–] Kolanaki@yiffit.net 21 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

I saw a comment the other day about this saying you'd need like over 4terrabytes of storage to run a BlueSky instance of your own, and that it's growing every day. That's fucking insane.

[–] garretble@lemmy.world 17 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

That’s addressed in the blog post. She was saying it was currently 5TB and growing. So anyone wanting to set up a server would need to pay for that space, and that’s not cheap.

[–] doggle@lemmy.dbzer0.com 16 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (1 children)

It's also not, like, unattainable

But it's definitely well beyond what any hobbyist is going to set up in a whim

[–] eleitl@lemm.ee 3 points 4 weeks ago

Meh, homelab storage and FTTH are reasonably cheap. Or rented iron like Hetzner.

[–] zarkanian@sh.itjust.works 5 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

I thought it takes that much storage to run a relay, not an instance. (Which Bluesky calls a "Personal Data Store.")

Maybe this is just my ignorance showing, but this seems like a really archaic way to design something like this in 2024. Dump all the data into a central repository and then have clients pull from that?

[–] aeshna_cyanea@lemm.ee 2 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

Bluesky (well, atproto, bluesky is the twitter clone running on atproto as a demo app) doesn't actually have instances in the mastodon sense, it's a more modular design for better scaling (because it was designed from the start to replace twitter)

Here's a good article with illustrations https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers

[–] TORFdot0@lemmy.world 1 points 4 weeks ago

It’s not exactly decentralized if you use the official relay only, just distributed which is a different concept entirely