If people cared about decentralization then we would not have seen the consolidation that we've seen. That's true even for technologies who pitch decentralization as a core feature, as we saw with cryptocurrencies -- the original argument was that cryptocurrencies allowed a decentralization of finance, but then we saw a handful of platforms centralize the trades, and most people who bought cryptocurrencies were pleased to have this convenience.
From moxie.org:
"Given the history of why web1 became web2, what seems strange to me about web3 is that technologies like ethereum have been built with many of the same implicit trappings as web1. To make these technologies usable, the space is consolidating around… platforms. Again. People who will run servers for you, and iterate on the new functionality that emerges. Infura, OpenSea, Coinbase, Etherscan."
They also make this point:
"I think this is very similar to the situation with email. I can run my own mail server, but it doesn’t functionally matter for privacy, censorship resistance, or control – because GMail is going to be on the other end of every email that I send or receive anyway."
For a variety of reasons, people have not felt that it is worthwhile to fight for decentralization.
Bluesky asks about which server to use on registration like mastodon.social does. For me the difference seems to be better marketing for Bluesky which makes people want to deal with the change and somewhat enjoy it rather than see every obstacle as a pain.
Bluesky does have some advantages like starter packs (and network effect now that it has so many accounts).
Mastodon typed in almost any search engine points to mastodon.social; in some cases joinmastodon.org shows up on top which still suggests mastodon.social but has a distinguish "pick another server" button on right side.
Bluesky by default creates account on bsky.social, while there's barely noticeable button with icon that allows you to provide another server.
An ordinary user will head to what it'll find in the search results, fill out credentials and log in. It won't change the defaults if it actually notice there's a possibility to do that at all. Not mention a mass user needs to be aware in the first place that there are other instances/servers, and you can interoperate with these just like with email providers. Neither mastodon or bluesky explains that in a simple discoverable fashion - which IMO should be done long ago.
one cool difference between Bluesky and Mastodon (et al) is that server choice on registration is not an immutable permanent decision and you can choose to seamlessly migrate at a later time by updating your DID document
so the slick registration flow nets you less lock-in compared to if e.g. the mainstream Mastodon app were funnelling users onto one megainstance, since you can still get away afterwards without needing people to re-follow you
You're right, when I tried again the field was hidden behind a link. Last time I checked (sometime last month) it was a field that defaulted to bsky.social (maybe within the account name?). Or I could be misremembering.
Yeah - technically the same button, but with a slightly more subtle treatment. People were getting confused by it and bouncing. IMO, since it's only really useful if you already know what you're doing and already have a PDS ready to go, there's no harm making the first-time experience smoother.
This is all totally going to change when OAuth rolls out, so hopefully we can find a better compromise then.
> Bluesky arrived at the right time, unlike Mastodon.
In fact Mastodon had a better chance than BlueSky ever had, but had a significantly worse onboarding experience.
Mastodon was there at the right time, (Nov 2022) but was extremely unprepared to onboard millions of users simultaneously and more people were left confused on how to use the platform or even how to create an account or "which instance" to sign up to.
This is the obvious reason why BlueSky succeeded and took off, as predicted. [0]
Yep, I was at the registration screen multiple times and always left confused. I’m a user now, but it’s quite dead for me while I got featured in a few starter packs a while ago on Bluesky.
It should be noted that, at least for now, account migration can only go one way. That is, from the main Bluesky PDS to an external one. According to the documentation on account migration[0], they plan to enable incoming migrations at some point in the future, but there's no timeline.
I'm sure a big reason for this the possibility for abuse, since "migrating" an account is a different action than simply "creating" a new one
Depending on when you tried things might be much better now. Moving accounts can be done in a couple of simple clicks. You might have issues with your history, which stays behind because cool URIs don't change.
With more places, comes more mental load and time waste. I for one use HN, Mastodon, and a single Discord server with some friends. I don't care about the rest.
Have you tried setting up and running an email server the past decade? Email is horribly centralized.
Nostr is the way. It will take time but it's sufficiently decentralized. Doesn't require DNS. Users hold their own keys. Fairly easy to run a relay. It's also a trust network, with encryption out of the box, so I think it will become a usable successor for email+GPG.
You’re seeing the downsides of decentralization not the result of centralization. There’s ~100’s of thousands of independently operated email servers, but nobody is directly forcing people to listen to everyone else. Instead they must stay reasonably open because the cloud didn’t win, work school and emails are still frequently independent.
This is an absolute killer for mainstream adoption. Normal people _absolutely do not want to manage keys_. And will lose them. Like, see Bitcoin; relatively enthusiast user base, and still people lose keys _all the time_.
This misses the point much like saying people should use Linux because it's open source. Open source is great, but at the end of the day, people will use software that they're both capable of using and that solves their problems. If you don't tick both of those boxes, the rest of it doesn't matter. Social media is the same, owning your data is nice, but if the barrier to both entry and maintenance is too high for a regular user, it's not going to happen.
Nostr is definitely at effort at decentralization. In practice it doesn't have a way to incentive running a node (relay) so became quite centralized.
Aside from that, it's quite a privacy nightmare (leaks ip everywhere) and became a vehicle to shill Lightning Network tokens.
Lightning uses incentives to keep nodes online, so it wouldn't be too difficult to leverage those incentives for Nostr with Zaps (earning a couple of sats per message for running a node and losing them if it goes offline for instance). However this would require a decentralized consensus system to assess node reputations.
I see no NIP for node incentives, perhaps this should be discussed further.
The first push was to mastodon and it was a disaster that probably saved X and might have contributed to trump winning all because of decentralized’s inherent bad UX.
Twitter/X has shown to be no more than a self-promotion and PR platform as soon as it became popular. Just disposable snippets (pretty much the definition of a 'twit') to drive views. The same will apply to Bluesky. It does not matter whether it is centralized or not, VC money or not, as long as it serves that purpose. In fact a centralized system probably serves this purpose better as it is easier for the users and for content reach.
The fundamental difference is that X is focussed on its "For You" feed while Bluesky focusses on "Following". They are similar tools, but the different approach means one is far closer to "self-promotion and PR" than the other, and I don't think it's inevitable that Bluesky will descend to X's depths.
What's the point of posting on those platforms? Self-promotion and PR. The difference you highlight is very superficial and ultimately it is the same thing.
The difference is your audience. Are you talking to people you know or are you talking to 'the world'. If I'm talking to a bunch of my friends in the pub, I don't consider that "self-promotion". If I'm stood on the street corner saying exactly the same kind of things, it would be. In fact, that means I think that posting a comment on Hacker News is more self-promotion than posting a comment on Bluesky. Which I do.
If you want to talk to people you know you have apps like Whatsapp. Bluesky is to talk to the world one way or another and so is the same as Twitter ultimately even if for the time being you may be able to filter what you see more.
I mean, just now I went to Bluesky's web homepage and what I saw is "discover" pointing me to "influencers"...
The fundamental difference is in the public: extreme-left for bluesky, trumpist for truth social and twitter for whoever isn't making a platform choice part of its identity.
The extreme left are on small mastodon servers and hate BlueSky and the large mastodon servers almost as much as X at this stage. Given Elon's control of the platform, manipulation of the algorithm and petty bans, it's been a while since X/Twitter has been a neutral choice. What's left of it is certainly at least as right wing as Bluesky is left.
