EDIT: whoops I fragmented this, continuing from https://social.coop/@cwebber/113647306776014159
> However, I disagree with some of the analysis, and have a couple specific points to correct.
Well this wouldn't be a 20 page response to a response if @bnewbold and I agreed with everything off the bat now would it
One thing @bnewbold did agree on is that "shared heap" and "message passing" are useful distinctions.
In fact I've seen members of the Bluesky team use "shared heap" a few times since to explain their tech since, and many people replied saying this distinction was illuminating. I'm really glad!
But before we get there oh hey, when I wrote my last blogpost I said "whoa in just 4 months storage expectations jumped from 1TB to 5TB. I bet in a month it'll be double, at least 10TB."
Whoops I underestimated, @bnewbold says in his post it's now at least 16TB. Growin' fast!
@bnewbold also mentions new initiatives like Jetstream and other tooling that provide a lighter experience
well, and that's true! ... though that's done by weakening the "zero compromises experience" quite a bit if you wanted to use them to "self host", more on that later
> This doesn't mean only well-funded for-profit corporations can participate! There are several examples in the fediverse of coop, club, and non-profit services with non-trivial budgets and infrastructure.
This is certainly true on the fediverse, I am hosted by a co-op. Thank you social.coop 💜
(@bnewbold is also on social.coop!)
I say this, by the way, as an Executive Director of a FOSS nonprofit with a much smaller budget and also oh god I hate fundraising I promised myself I would never do a fundraising job again why am I doing this
Did I mention we're doing a fundraiser? https://spritely.institute/donate/
Just sayin' ;_;
My friend @n8fr8 of the Guardian Project likes to point at Signal's budget and say "yeah that looks big, but you know how much the government spends on each fighter jet?" and it's some unimaginably large number, like *hundreds* of millions of dollars per jet
Signal is the cost of a jet wing
Anyway we should give Signal the jet wing money
Can someone get @spritely some of the jet wing money?
Anyway you'd think if you were upset about the government "taking your tax money" you'd at least want to get something out of it and FOSS helps everyone so this is so frustrating
Okay, I'm back from my meeting. I also have tea.
We're about to get to the first REALLY substantial part, which is terminology. Is it fair to call Bluesky "decentralized" or "federated"?
Both @bnewbold and I provided definitions and we are going to COMPARE and ANALYZE
So, is Bluesky decentralized? Is it federated?
In my previous blogpost, I concluded that Bluesky was not either.
@bnewbold conceded that maybe Bluesky does not meet *my* definitions, but provides some alternative definitions, which maybe it does meet
Were my definitions too strong or unfair?
@bnewbold declares he will "choose his own fighter" and selects Mark Nottingham's independent IETF submission, RFC 9518: Centralization, Decentralization, and Internet Standards
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc9518/
It's an interesting document, and it turns out, has some interesting context
@cwebber Yes, very true. A network is decentralised only if you can remove any node and the network keeps functioning.
If we removed a giant node like mastodon.social, we'd temporarily lose a lot of accounts but the fediverse would keep functioning just fine (probably better in the long run if it permanently eliminated a dominant player).
The thought occurs that it's not so black and white because functionality changes depending on what you're observing and from where.
For example, you might argue that removal of a minor node would have no discernible impact on the overall system, but it would have a critical impact on the few users of that node.
I've long said that Fediverse isn't so much decentralized as re-centralized around instances. So I guess that's what people mean by federated instead of decentralized.
It seems like Bluesky addresses this better, being more decentralized in terms of not being reliant on instances.
My memory of Bluesky is the opposite, but I'm not at a computer to double check that right now.
As I recall, ActivityPub is the hub and spoke with instances acting as hubs to the spokes of user interfaces while BlueSky allows users to engage through multiple repeaters (whatever they call them) avoiding that point of failure.