You can host your own instance, but resolving forks is not self-authenticating and requires some central trust (because of the 72 hour rollback window for higher priority rotation keys). Not counting that, you could essentially run your own fully independent instance where the worst that could happen is that you lack some newer updates to people's did documents (but anyone can upload them since they're self-authenticating). Some people do run their own instances for caching reasons, but these just ingest operations from the official one.
In terms of "credible exit", if the community at large could decide to move to a different PLC host, it would be technically possible for everyone to switch over.
Worth mentioning that Bluesky PBC is relinquishing legal control over the PLC and spinning it off into its own entity based in Switzerland.[1]
Relays aren't really user-facing, so most relay operators would probably only censor a user on the relay if there is some legal or network reason to do so, say content illegal in their jurisdiction or excessive spam.
If an app is concerned that a relay is censoring some user that they care about, the easiest solution is just to host their own relay. It's probably cheaper to operate than their app is. But if they really wanted to, they could listen to multiple relays to "cover the gap" or just manually listen to the event stream from specific users' PDSs directly whenever they notice censorship (effectively operating a partial relay in addition to listening to a full but censored one). But, again, in reality they'd just host their own relay and not bother complicating things.
The hardest problem of relays censoring content is to notice it happening, but once you notice you can easily verify it and switch to a different relay.
> [...] It's technically possible for people to use alternative services, but the community would have to wrestle the majority control of the network away from Bluesky Social PBC for it to really matter. [...]
> [...] now you just have the same split world that exists in the Fediverse, but with AppViews/moderation services. It kinda seems like the "shared picture of the world" concept is actually somewhat incompatible with having an actual decentralized network where users meaningfully have control.
I think an illustrative example of how a "community split" can happen is Blacksky[1]. It used to only be a custom feed but now have their own client app, their own moderation services, their own relay for their internal services, their own PDS for hosting their accounts, and to the best of my knowledge they want to set up their own Bluesky AppView at some point. With their own AppView, whenever a user is logged in to their client app they'd be using Blacksky's AppView, and anytime they're logged in to bsky.app they're using Bluesky's AppView. A user doesn't need to configure anything, they just download an app and log in with their existing account, and they can be logged into both apps at the same time. Compared to moving your account, to a new home server for Mastodon or even to a new PDS with atproto, it is very simple for your average user to use another AppView.
The "control" users have here isn't that they can control everything that happens within one app, it's that they're not limited to one app or one backend, and that communities of users can meaningfully run their own services if they're not being properly served by the existing alternatives, all while they still seamlessly get a fully global view of every Bluesky user and post.
And hell, atproto is very modular. People have made clients[2] that connect directly to users' PDSs and some "backlink" service like Constellation[3] (to get all likes, replies, etc.), which is much cheaper to run, skipping a Bluesky-compatible AppView entirely. There's also AppViewLite[4] which is a partial Bluesky AppView that's tailor-made for self-hosting.
Having all users, all posts, all data just be available globally to everyone means that you can create very novel and experimental decentralized services and apps. That is personally what excites me the most about atproto and how I see "user choice" be best served. How about a censorship-resistant client app more reminiscent of nostr that connects to multiple Bluesky Appviews and combines the resulting data? Or how about some ActivityPub-like AppView where small communities run their own homes and ping each other whenever there is new activity, eschewing a relay altogether. Everything is possible with atproto, and all of these services would create data existing globally for every other service and user, that can be interoperably viewed and created by any other atproto app that wants to do so.
> I literally was just following some artists, mostly Japanese, and I assume one of them got banned for something NSFW.
I'm personally one of the largest critics of how Bluesky Social PBC treat Japanese anime-style illustrators, so I share your frustration here. Though it's worth noting that large Mastodon instances do the same kind of moderation. Trying to follow illustrators on misskey.io from mastodon.social is very much a toin coss if they're censored or not.
One of my hopes is that we will eventually get the Bluesky AppView equivalent to Pawoo/Misskey. Ideally that one would create records compatible both with Bluesky and some new Pixiv-style atproto app. Then users could set up *booru sites too which work on the same underlying data as what the artists upload, i.e. the artist would keep control over the data. That kind of interoperability makes for a much more interesting web!
> I'm personally one of the largest critics of how Bluesky Social PBC treat Japanese anime-style illustrators, so I share your frustration here. Though it's worth noting that large Mastodon instances do the same kind of moderation. Trying to follow illustrators on misskey.io from mastodon.social is very much a toin coss if they're censored or not.
I can't stress this enough: I don't find it acceptable to ban people if they like posts or follow someone who gets banned. That sort of guilt-by-association is insane. It's one thing to be more censorial than Twitter, which is a choice you can make if you want to, but Bluesky went many steps way too far in how they enforce the rules. I still can't even fathom what actually got me banned, and the cowards there would never admit it (because they know it was wrong.) The only way I'd ever consider going back is if they announced that they fired everyone who thought that was a good idea.
If they're willing to do insane shit like that, I would absolutely not trust any of the other aspects of the components ran by Bluesky Social PBC, so it's far more than an AppView that is needed for sure.
Then there's the fact that Bluesky Social PBC constantly advertised itself as a decentralized alternative to Twitter back before it had launched, well, any decentralized components. Before you could run your own PDS, and certainly before they stopped requiring whitelisting. People make a lot of hooplah about how users shouldn't care about decentralization. Well, a lot of people leaving Twitter at the time did care about decentralization, because they were tired of what was happening to their Internet and wanted a durable alternative. To this day, Bluesky doesn't really actually practically have any of the properties of decentralization that anyone would care about. They know it damn well.
I hate that everybody is just going to let this happen, and I hate that Bluesky proponents jump in and try their hardest to make it seem like there's hope for things to not be controlled by one entity. There isn't. It's a complete load of shit.
> I can't stress this enough: I don't find it acceptable to ban people if they like posts or follow someone who gets banned.
To the best of my knowledge, that kind of banning has only happened once[1] (I was one of the handful caught up in it lol). They reversed that ban when I complained. Unless you were banned at that exact time, what likely happened to you is that some kind of anti-spam filter thought you were a suspicious new account, agnostic of the content of the posts/accounts.
> I hate that everybody is just going to let this happen, and I hate that Bluesky proponents jump in and try their hardest to make it seem like there's hope for things to not be controlled by one entity. There isn't. It's a complete load of shit.
There already are other apps working independently from all of Bluesky's infrastructure (save for plc.directory). I think the big thing holding the protocol back is that they have not implemented private data yet (and it's probably a couple years off). Lots of apps need that, so many apps would not want to use the protocol yet.
I'm hopeful about the future of the protocol, because it does provide the aspect of decentralization I value most: your account is a signed repo and a private key (or several), and the network is necessarily fully open for any app to make use of however they want. Even client-side single-page web apps are feasible with generic backlink services (Constellation), which I find super cool. All that is needed now is time and app development.
> To the best of my knowledge, that kind of banning has only happened once[1] (I was one of the handful caught up in it lol). They reversed that ban when I complained. Unless you were banned at that exact time, what likely happened to you is that some kind of anti-spam filter thought you were a suspicious new account, agnostic of the content of the posts/accounts.
It was definitely around the time of that post. Here's the message I got around 10 months ago:
> Recently, we removed a Bluesky account you control for violations of our guidelines. After a thorough review, we have determined that the takedown action applied to your account was incorrect.
What struck me about this series of posts is how they still never acknowledged exactly what they did (which is, took down accounts using guilt-by-association) nor did they claim they wouldn't do it again, only that they made mistakes while doing it, and they didn't even bother to properly apologize for banning people incorrectly at any point. It reads as if they felt it was all fine and justified and that they will do it again, just, correctly this time, as if there is a right way to do that.
Even if they did stop this practice (again I truly doubt it), there are things you can do that, while they may feel reasonable and justifiable given the circumstances, are a permanent way to lose people's trust. For me this is one of them. I don't think anyone should feel safe hitting like on a post on Bluesky, unless you're absolutely sure it could never be found in violation of any rules. That's insane. Why would I want to be on any network controlled by Bluesky Social PDS when that's how they run it?
> There already are other apps working independently from all of Bluesky's infrastructure (save for plc.directory). I think the big thing holding the protocol back is that they have not implemented private data yet (and it's probably a couple years off). Lots of apps need that, so many apps would not want to use the protocol yet.
> I'm hopeful about the future of the protocol, because it does provide the aspect of decentralization I value most: your account is a signed repo and a private key (or several), and the network is necessarily fully open for any app to make use of however they want. Even client-side single-page web apps are feasible with generic backlink services (Constellation), which I find super cool. All that is needed now is time and app development.
I'm beyond bummed out because I was actually pretty excited for Bluesky early on, but I think they had a window that opened and closed for properly decentralizing. Bluesky today is a heavily curated and heavily moderated network that resembles absolutely nothing of what you would expect from a supposedly "decentralized" network, which is a load of shit for something whose entire draw was that in the first place. What they've created today is so centralized that they can feasibly close it off tomorrow without any impact on 99.9% of users. It's one thing to extol the virtues of its architecture, but that architecture hasn't really been proven to work well in a truly decentralized environment, which is not good when it has already been scaled to these heights. I don't just mean in terms of continuing to function and scale well, I mean in terms of how the network handles abuse and bad actors, and how Bluesky Social PBC will handle parts of the network that don't agree with their moderation policies. (i.e. Was it really wrong to spend so much time highlighting the issues with inconsistency in the Fediverse if ATProto winds up with the exact same issues where the world appears very different depending on what AppView you're on?)
While I admire Dan Abramov's work on React, his attempts to show that Bluesky decentralization is actually happening were to list two alternative AppViews, except apparently, one of them was actually not a full AppView instance. So actually, there is basically one known alternative AppView to Bluesky's AppView. Bluesky has something north of 38 million users, and approaching-100% of them are going to be using Bluesky's AppView. Given the utter lack of incentives to really run an alternative AppView, and the fact that nobody except complete and utter nerds will ever even find them, is there really any good reason to suspect that there will be any alternative AppViews in the long run, or if they exist, that any more than a tiny unimportant fraction of users will ever use them?
The Fediverse has had instances that have done dumb things, but the thing is, you can currently today actually choose any instance you want. A future where you can use Bluesky without the direct influence or control from Bluesky Social PDS in either your personal affairs or even just almost every single interaction you'll ever have is very distant. If we were to extrapolate, it doesn't seem likely the situation will have meaningfully changed in several years. I'd be willing to place bets that in 10 years at least 99% of users will still be on Bluesky Social PBC's main AppView. (To be honest, I wonder if anyone would actually be willing to place money on this bet. I kinda suspect even Bluesky proponents would admit that this is pretty likely.)
In terms of "credible exit", if the community at large could decide to move to a different PLC host, it would be technically possible for everyone to switch over.
Worth mentioning that Bluesky PBC is relinquishing legal control over the PLC and spinning it off into its own entity based in Switzerland.[1]
[1] https://docs.bsky.app/blog/plc-directory-org