Niccolo Venerandi breaks down some of the technical reasons behind why Bluesky is, shall we say, not living up to its promise of decentralization. I suspect it is by design.
TL;DR: Bluesky claims it wants to decentralize, but the protocol is built in a way as to be prohibitively expensive for anyone but large businesses to set up a connected server.
And in my layperson’s reading, this heavy-handed design sounds deliberate. In fact, from the details I can wrap my head around, the architecture just sounds like blockchain with a different name—or perhaps expanded to fit the needs of a social media platform. I’ll echo a quote Venerandi used from Christine Lemmer-Webber, a co-author of the Fediverse’s ActivityPub:
The physical world equivalent for a fully decentralized fediverse then is that every user sends mail to every other user’s house, as needed, similar to how sending letters works in the physical world. This is decidedly not the case with a fully decentralized ATProto [from Bluesky]. The physical world equivalent would be that every user had their own house at which they stored a copy of every piece of mail delivered to every other user at their house.
That’s how blockchains work, and why they are a terrible idea.
This all tracks because Bluesky was started and is funded by crypto scammers.
No thanks.