Could someone please explain to me whether Bluesky is decentralized?

[internic@mathstodon.xyz]

@cwebber At the risk of asking a serious question, what's the deal with all these alternative ATProto apps? Are there any that have significant independent infrastructure?

https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/04/beyond-bluesky-these-are-the-apps-building-social-experiences-on-the-at-protocol/

I'm guessing that the answer is that they mostly share the same infrastructure and just provide a different AppView and possibly a different lexicon (not sure that's the right term) as far as the data they store and can interact with. But given that I have a very limited understanding of how Bluesky works under the hood, I'd be interested in a (much) more knowledgeable perspective.

[per_sonne@ciberlandia.pt]

@cwebber

It's "decentralized" but only has one, very central, instance.

So...it's like claiming you have a multicoloured pencil box, but with only one blue pencil inside, no other pencils available and no plans to provide them.

[maryjane@social.coletivos.org]

@cwebber Please!Do your own research to find the blogposts you wrote!

[justin@toot.io]

@cwebber it's "semi" bridged to the Fediverse, but it's opt-in I believe, you have to follow the bridge to enable it.

[mishavanmollusq@sfba.social]

@rcriii @cwebber

BlueSky so beyond The Cloud

[philip@mastodon.mallegolhansen.com]

@cwebber I don’t know what “decentralized” means, but I keep hearing about how much fun* bluesky is.

*Fun is limited to those in the good grace of the Turkish government and may be revoked at any time.

[chadarius@twit.social]

@cwebber Being decentralized and have the capability of being decentralized are very different things. Bluesky has the capability of being decentralized. It also works a little bit differently than Mastodon. You see the same feed no matter what instance you use with Bluesky.

[cwebber@social.coop]

@SuperDicq ok thanks, it's too bad there can't be a source though, I thought it was open source

[cwebber@social.coop]

@per_sonne is crayola decentralized though

[eblu@wetdry.world]

@cwebber it doesn't use activitypub so it isn't decentralized. this is because activitypub is clearly the only decentralized social networking protocol that has been fully and completely adopted by several applications like mastodon, and billionaires cannot run mastodon unlike bluesky's expensive "relays" that the fediverse doesn't have

[cwebber@social.coop]

@eblu billionaire-proof

[slothrop@chaos.social]

@cwebber It's a quantum thing. It's decentralized, until you observe it closely. Then it isn't.

[Gæst]

@cwebber somewhat, but if bluesky the company goes down the network collapses

you can store your own data on your server

but bluesky owns:
- the main appview
- the main moderation service (which is hardcoded into their appview and can just disappear your account from everyone else)
- the main relay (AFAIK there are no real alternatives, they can also ban you on this level if you run your own data server)
- the service storing information about user IDs (DID:PLC, IIUC if this ever goes down most accounts are immediately gone)

[Gæst]

@cwebber this is very different from Fedi, here if mastodon.social suddenly disappeared, the rest of the network would go on as normal

[Gæst]

@cwebber also running your own data server is a clusterfuck.

but I still did it

[Gæst]

@cwebber I just realized you wrote ActivityPub

I'm too autistic for this shit ​​

[cwebber@social.coop]

@lunareclipse In all seriousness I am glad when people have actually tried to run the infrastructure

[zalasur@mastodon.surazal.net]

@lunareclipse @cwebber I just wanted to chime in to say that at the very least it was an informative answer.

[torynski@mastodon.scot]

@cwebber from what I read it can be decentralised, in the sense that if you really try hard, you'd be able to host your own instance, but it will never be peer-to-peer, so the traffic will always go through the bluesky central hub.

I am not really a technical guy so I might misunderstood it, so I am looking forward to read the replies too.

[elplatt@greatjustice.net]

@cwebber Did they buy a bunch of centralization offsets? Maybe there's a mesh network of raspberry pis planted in a rainforest somewhere?