Instances are centralised, but the network isn’t.

Yeah, it doesn’t even have communities.

Yes, it is, but so is mastodon, if I curate my feed, I can exclude them from it.
this is about the technical aspects of bluesky/atproto.

I like both formats, but I do prefer forum-style conversation.

https://frontpage.fyi/ is a link-aggregator built on atproto.

Lemmy uses ActivityPub, so that can’t really be done in line with the spec.

Bluesky would work better for that, since everything would be on the AppView. Hosting multiple appviews would be intensive on the relays, but different ones could keep content for different amounts of time.

I think AP works better when you don’t need or want all the information to be available at once.

I use them interchanagbly, which has proved to be a mistake.
Kinda like how mastodon and fediverse are used interchangably.

👍

No, mastodon is more decentralised than bluesky, but its designed so that PDSes aren’t that important, unlike mastodon.

I feel like that’s closer to email, which is a shitshow when it comes to decentralisation.

I was misremembering something here, mastodon always keeps old keys iirc, but lemmy caches them temporarily iirc.

There are instances though.
Portability makes it really easy to migrate accounts. You just need a .car archive of your old one.

Decentralisation is not black and white, and depends on your defintion of the word.
At this point, the problem is that everyone is on bluesky’s servers. There is little technical problems.

Annoyingly, most people aren’t interested in that.
Also: I found this list: https://github.com/mary-ext/atproto-scraping

There’s a good few more PDSes than I thought. There’s a few with open signups. Though, for relays the situation is a bit more bleak.
I’m sure it will improve in future, there is a lot of orgs planning on setting up AT infrastructure.

That’s a good point.
I think by recipient they meant followers in general.

Oh.
Well, as of now, there’s little incentive to host one.
AppViewLite lets you use the network without a relay, which I think is cool.

Because all the nerds who want to do that are on mastodon ; ).

Jokes aside, people are self hosting them, there’s about 2000 independant PDSes right now.

do you mean instances having a native atproto implementation? Wafrn is kinda like that.

Also: Bluesky isn’t maintaining the bridge, its maintained by someone else.

Yes, this does help, but atproto as a whole still doesn’t scale well:

In the beginning of our network, we have 26 users, which conveniently for us map to each letter of the English alphabet: [Alice, Bob, Carol, … Zack]. Each user sends one message per day, which is intended to have one recipient. (This may sound unrealistic, but this is fine to do to model our scenario.) To simplify things, we’ll have each user send a message in a ring: Alice sends a message to Bob, Bob sends a message to Carol, and so on, all the way up to Zack, who simply we wrap around and have message Alice. This could be because these messages have specific intended recipients or it could be because Bob is the sole “follower” of Alice’s posts, Carol is the sole “follower” of Bob’s, etc.

Let’s look at what happens in a single day under both systems.

Under message passing, Alice sends her message to Bob. Only Bob need receive the message. So on and so forth.

From an individual self-hosted server, only one message is passed per day: 1. From the fully decentralized network, the total number of messages passed, zooming out, is the number of participants in the network: 26. Under the public-gods-eye-view-shared-heap model, each user must know of all messages to know what may be relevant. Each user must receive all messages.

From an individual self-hosted server, 26 messages must be received.

Zooming out, the number of messages which must be transmitted in the day is 26 * 26: 676, since each user receives each message.

Okay, so what does that mean? How bad is this? With 26 users, this doesn’t sound like so much. Now let’s add 5 users.

Under message passing:

Per server, still 1 message received per user per day. Per the network, it’s 5 extra messages transmitted per day, which makes sense: we’ve added 5 users. Under the public-gods-eye-view-shared-heap model:

Per server: 5 new messages received per user per day.

Per the network, it’s ((31 * 31) - (26 * 26)): 285 new messages per day!

But we aren’t actually running networks of 26 users. We are running networks of millions of users. What would happen if we had a million self-hosted users and five new users were added to the network? Zooming out, once again, the message passing system simply has five new messages sent. Under the public shared heap model, it is 10,000,025 new messages sent! For adding five new self-hosted users! (And that’s even just with our simplified model of only sending one message per day per user!)

Source: https://dustycloud.org/blog/re-re-bluesky-decentralization/

As well as this, if there was a reddit-like atproto AppView, setting up multiple instances of it would still result in the same problems.

Actually, take a look at AppViewLite, it lets you skip relays and crawl PDSes directly. Its fairly lightweight as well, so you could host it alongside a PDS.