Nora, tech aspect on Nostr: I'm sad to see the Matrix team repeating the lie that Bluesky is decentralized in ...
I'm sad to see the Matrix team repeating the lie that Bluesky is decentralized in their recent post [1]. When you look at the distinction between the two, it’s clear as day that we either need to stop calling Bluesky decentralized, or choose a new word for things that actually promote a network without megainstances and centralization.
Running a single Synapse server is enough to chat with your friends, completely in isolation. Two groups running Synapse can talk to each other without any interference from a third party, and you can self-host sydent or ma1sd or what have you for the identity API, too. You store and transmit the data required for conversations you participate in.
Running a Bluesky PDS, on the other hand, gives you control over your own data, to an extent, but Bluesky-the-company, or some other large entity, must be involved in order for you to talk to anyone else, because running a relay is expensive and legally risky. While you can argue this is technically “decentralized”, it’s qualitatively different from the way that things like Matrix and ActivityPub work.
Twitter has a single center. ATProto is designed to facilitate a network with a few centers rather than one, and views megarelays like bluesky.network as a success; a relay that isn’t enormous is a failure. Matrix, ActivityPub, and so forth are designed for a network with thousands of small “centers”, none of which need a complete view of the network, and the community tends to view mega-instances like mastodon.social, matrix.im, etc. as failures of the system.
https://matrix.org/blog/2024/10/29/matrix-2.0-is-here/
Running a single Synapse server is enough to chat with your friends, completely in isolation. Two groups running Synapse can talk to each other without any interference from a third party, and you can self-host sydent or ma1sd or what have you for the identity API, too. You store and transmit the data required for conversations you participate in.
Running a Bluesky PDS, on the other hand, gives you control over your own data, to an extent, but Bluesky-the-company, or some other large entity, must be involved in order for you to talk to anyone else, because running a relay is expensive and legally risky. While you can argue this is technically “decentralized”, it’s qualitatively different from the way that things like Matrix and ActivityPub work.
Twitter has a single center. ATProto is designed to facilitate a network with a few centers rather than one, and views megarelays like bluesky.network as a success; a relay that isn’t enormous is a failure. Matrix, ActivityPub, and so forth are designed for a network with thousands of small “centers”, none of which need a complete view of the network, and the community tends to view mega-instances like mastodon.social, matrix.im, etc. as failures of the system.
https://matrix.org/blog/2024/10/29/matrix-2.0-is-here/