OpenStars

Very nice 👌 I hope we will see more applications for these protocols as time passes.

One issue for me, and this is also true of Mastodon and by extension Mbin, is that I greatly prefer the voting and focus on a topic area rather than person. X / Twitter / Mastodon / Bluesky is where celebrities go to increase their profits, fame, and relevance, while Reddit / Lemmy / PieFed (/ + nodeBB + flarum + others) are where we discuss matters of import. I’m not criticizing your post here - this is definitely the correct community to discuss such matters:-) - just interjecting my personal preferences into the conversation, to disclose my own biases.

If Lemmy.World went away, then correct you would not “lose” the users as, well you said it, they would simply move to another instance.

But if Lemmy.World remained and you blocked it (if you had a method to do that - it’s not easy at all using base Lemmy but it is doable with some older apps or like Ublock Origin filter rules and such), then in that context you would indeed “lose” all of that content. Or like if you got banned from that instance then that’s another way that you could “lose” access to engage with communities located on it.

The more centralized something is, like Reddit, the more damaging it is to lose access to it, while the more decentralized, as you pointed out, the less overall effect that perturbations have upon the network.

That seems a very good way to phrase it.

The next issue then becomes cost. Which affects Lemmy as well: first there is the requisite effort to set up and self-host even a tiny instance (especially as it relates to potential spam and CSAM attacks), and second the network traffic costs. The latter may be tiny for a single user who only subscribes to a handful of communities, but someone trying to browse All and wanting everything to be available for their perusal (even if deleted soon-ish for storage reasons) will bear a much higher burden. Which depending on local costs may be trivially easy… or prohibitively expensive, but in either case the more data that someone wants to pull in the higher the cost.

And I imagine that Bluesky is either similar, or significantly worse.

Bluesky is decentralised in theory, but in reality it is not.

I loved how you phrased it here:-).

Looking at your other comment on this thread, thank you - that kind of breakdown was precisely what I was hoping to see!:-)

So Bluesky is more decentralized than Reddit (or Facebook), but barely, and far less so than any Fediverse platform currently.

I think what OP was trying to convey was less the current state of affairs and more the underlying protocol itself, which they re-released now under a separate post.

Nice. I remember when it was 80%, then it fell to half, 40%, and apparently now is closer to a third than half. Excellent decentralizing!:-)

I hope I am not adding to the problem here as well. It seems that obviously Bluesky is neither fully centralized nor fully decentralized. Is there a statement about just how much of either it is?

Although that might be complicated - like someone could say that Lemmy is fairly centralized, bc if you block Lemmy.World then you lose half the users and perhaps half the communities (and PieFed even more so, with PieFed.social representing an even higher fraction of users and communities on it).

So there is a distinction between Bluesky the service as it currently is implemented and Bluesky the protocol, the former of which is fairly centralized but the latter is more expandable?

Lemm.ee is recruiting new admins!, from four months ago.