It's a comparison they are directly inviting, by constantly claiming it's decentralized. And then its defenders get upset when people rightfully point out that there is only a single instance, because that single instance going down takes the whole thing down. Like in Google Reader.
if mastodon.social goes down, people would rightfully say that mastodon.social went down even though it's open source and anyone could run their own.
>"But where are all the Bluesky instances?"
I agree that it doesn't mean "atproto went down", and I don't mean to imply that. but "bluesky went down" is completely accurate, and bluesky is the one claiming to be decentralized due to using atproto. there are no other instances in bluesky's network, only partial ones (blacksky, last I heard they were still working on a major piece?), hence the "no it's not" responses. and that's also how they're directly encouraging people conflating the two.
I’m speaking about the hypothetical situation where an app is blown from the face of the earth, not temporarily goes down. I thought that’s what the parent discussion was about. I’m not sure what we’re discussing now.
All I’m saying is that if a developer forever takes down some atproto app, another developer can put up a new app that shows the old app’s data because the data is actually inside the users’ repositories. This is similar to how if Microsoft ever discontinued Word, you could still open Word documents in Google Docs. Does that make sense?
Re: Blacksky, they do fully run on their own infra now. So it doesn’t depend on Bluesky’s database.
it's somewhat similar, yeah. minus the part where bluesky itself is by far the majority host of people's data. that puts it more in the realm of "Office 365 Online + OneDrive storage" than "Word" - a lot of people will lose a lot of data, though something resembling it can be started up again. and people with backups (their own PDS) will just move to OpenOffice for a bit.
Blacksky finishing their full forking does finally give them a much stronger leg to stand on for "bluesky is decentralized", though.
PDSes are great and I really wish Mastodon would support something similar. Mastodon's lack of account portability / data ownership / lightweight hosting is a massive issue.
They're funding Fig to create and run a "full network backup" solution. What Bluesky really needs to do is figure out a way to get users to own their own backup recover key, whether personally or through some third-party service.
I'm sorry, just to clarify: in your scenario where the app/company is suddenly vaporized from the face of the earth, if that happened to Bluesky right now it would effectively mean that >90% of content currently published using Atproto would be lost?
Realistically, I can't say "yes" because I'm sure there's plenty of copies of entire network by now. They would be out of date but would have all old records. So that could be maybe 70% that's already backed up. I guess they likely won't include images/blobs. There's an ongoing project to build an always-available full archive with this specific purpose (https://atproto.com/blog/introducing-hubble-a-public-mirror-...) so it is also an active area of work.
If we imagine that nobody has a full copy today or is unwilling to share it, the answer would technically be yes.
I'd still say that, for an app going down, the answer is "no" because "Bluesky app" and "Bluesky hosting" are like two separate services. The point I was making was that specifically "apps going down doesn't destroy data". (The distinction between "Bluesky app" and "Bluesky hosting" isn't completely contrived because I'd expect the cost of running the app to be many orders of magnitude higher than the cost of running hosting.)
But if you pick a hosting company, and users don't have backups, and nobody does mirroring, then yes, hosting disappearing would destroy data. As with literally any hosting.
Yeah I'm kinda waiting for this. I don't like to join bluesky because I want it more decentralised but I can't join blacksky because it's only for black people.
I'm kinda hoping someone sets up a rainbowsky or something for us in the LGBT community. Now that I would join.
Blacksky is not only for Black people. They’re only reserving the blacksky.social domain handles for them, everyone else who wants to have a Blacksky account can use the myatproto.social domain.
Theres also front ends that avoid using an appview at all if that sounds preferable to relying on an appview not run by your PDS host: https://tangled.org/whey.party/red-dwarf
Blacksky is now fully independent and does not have any reliance on Bluesky whatsoever.
In fact, in cases where Bluesky _did_ go down, Blacksky was still working fine (if a little slow due to the amount of Bluesky people on Blacksky), and people were able to make posts and everything.
> blacksky, last I heard they were still working on a major piece?
While that was true, I don't think it's true anymore. I think blacksky is fully independent. Eurosky is currently in the spot you're describing (partially independent, but moving towards also being fully independent).
