Question for my web nerds— #BlueSky uses a global index "fire hose" and pull method for its #ATProtocol federation. It appears any server can create its own global index but of course, technically and effectively possible are two different things.
Does this approach disqualify BlueSky as "decentralized" social media or "federated"?
I'm trying to define the two terms but I'm finding it surprisingly difficult as I'd have to ignore lots of contradictions.
@fromjason We will probably be debating this for years… there's no clear answer since it's not a 0-1 matter, but rather shades of gray.
Right now things are pretty centralized on the relay and AppView level, since there are no alternatives. So if they wanted to e.g. censor someone unfairly (i.e. not an obvious spammer etc.), they could. Would they? I believe not, but that's my opinion.
@fromjason But things could be very different a year from now. I think some people are playing with relays and/or AppViews. I'm thinking about building one myself. Running those shouldn't be super hard, only scaling them to large traffic is.
But if people still mostly use Bluesky's ones, how much that changes things? Hard to say. It will just be "more % decentralized" than it is now.
(You could argue Mastodon is also some % centralized because of m.s, for some small but non-zero %.)
@fromjason My reading of the protocol docs makes me think that they really are trying to be decentralized/federated, but nobody knows how the tech or culture will work out in practice once there are multiple instances (assuming that happens).
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