Yeah because decentralization is just a gimmick. It sounds cool on paper, but in reality it doesn’t solve many problems - it just introduces many others. The only situation where it helps is if an instance goes down permanently, and even then it’s not that helpful.
Decentralization greatly decreases vendor lock-in, lessens the damage of a single actor and adds competition. These are serious long-term benefits for a service and its users.
There’s a reason why something like email is still around and being innovated on 40 years later, while its proprietary competitors are long since dead. And it’s not that the technology is very good.
Bluesky is just another ICQ/AIM/Slashdot/Digg, a little walled garden that will eventually be ran into the ground. Which is fine. The issue is that it’s trying to embrace and extinguish the fediverse by pretending to be decentralized.
There’s a reason why something like email is still around and being innovated on 40 years later, while its proprietary competitors are long since dead.
Can you tell me more about those competitors? I did a quick google search but could not find anything tangible
Yes, but there is a huge difference between email and social media - namely the community. You don’t have that in email, so changing a provider is as simple as “my email now says @gmail.com”. For social media, you need to “migrate” an entire group of people and the content that was present on a doomed instance. Which never happens. It’s never seamless, it’s always the “same” community with no history, different moderation, server, with different people. Don’t get me started on two communities about the same thing, on two different servers, that don’t know about one another.
Fracturing the lifeblood of your “forum”, “community” - your users will end up making decentralized frameworks / social media less popular than large centralized ones - no matter what you do.
making sure every single account you had that is tied to your email now points to a correct new one. And also informing every one of your contacts of the change, which is easier but also less efficient since half of them is going to miss the announcement and keep writing to an email that no longer exists
The point is that bluesky has no interest in being actually decentralized, it’s just a gimmick
Yeah because decentralization is just a gimmick. It sounds cool on paper, but in reality it doesn’t solve many problems - it just introduces many others. The only situation where it helps is if an instance goes down permanently, and even then it’s not that helpful.
Decentralization greatly decreases vendor lock-in, lessens the damage of a single actor and adds competition. These are serious long-term benefits for a service and its users.
There’s a reason why something like email is still around and being innovated on 40 years later, while its proprietary competitors are long since dead. And it’s not that the technology is very good.
Bluesky is just another ICQ/AIM/Slashdot/Digg, a little walled garden that will eventually be ran into the ground. Which is fine. The issue is that it’s trying to embrace and extinguish the fediverse by pretending to be decentralized.
Can you tell me more about those competitors? I did a quick google search but could not find anything tangible
Yes, but there is a huge difference between email and social media - namely the community. You don’t have that in email, so changing a provider is as simple as “my email now says @gmail.com”. For social media, you need to “migrate” an entire group of people and the content that was present on a doomed instance. Which never happens. It’s never seamless, it’s always the “same” community with no history, different moderation, server, with different people. Don’t get me started on two communities about the same thing, on two different servers, that don’t know about one another.
Fracturing the lifeblood of your “forum”, “community” - your users will end up making decentralized frameworks / social media less popular than large centralized ones - no matter what you do.
making sure every single account you had that is tied to your email now points to a correct new one. And also informing every one of your contacts of the change, which is easier but also less efficient since half of them is going to miss the announcement and keep writing to an email that no longer exists