I see a lot of misinformation about bluesky here, so I want to address a lot of the talking points against atproto/bluesky.
This is partially inspired by accounts like mastodon migration and feditips being really annoying about bluesky.
How Bluesky Works
I see a lot of people misunderstanding how it works.
The network has three main parts:
- A PDS -- This stands for Personal Data Server. These store information in records, like who you are following, your posts, who you are blocking and your images.
- A relay -- These crawl PDSes and keep a copy of all the records on them. They give a "Firehose" of all the data on the network (that they crawled).
- An AppView -- These index and work through the data from the firehose. All interactions are handled through these, meaning if someone follows me on bluesky, that
app.bsky.graph.followrecord will be crawled by the relay, and recieved by the AppView. https://bsky.app/ is an Appview. Appviews don't always have to use the relays, https://whtwnd.com/ connects to PDSes directly.
This is different to ActivityPub, where if I follow someone, my server sends that information directly to the other person's server.
Common misconceptions
An atproto relay is too expensive to run.
https://atproto.africa/ is a second full-network relay run by the blacksky team. We already have a second relay, and they're not even that expensive to run anymore, a lot of people run non-archival (meaning it doesn't backfill every post) relays for less than $40 a month.
There is no instances available except for bsky.social
bsky.social isn't actually an instance, its just the domain name assigned to users by default. This is explained here: https://app.wafrn.net/fediverse/post/f8fc8da8-cd7e-4fae-a895-ac59dc28088f
Wafrn has (opt-in) bluesky support, they act as a PDS and AppView, so if bluesky disappears tomorrow they can switch to the atproto.africa relay. (There is DID:PLC which is a problem, but I'll get to that later.)
You can't defederate bsky.social, this proves atproto is centralised!
https://app.wafrn.net/fediverse/post/f8fc8da8-cd7e-4fae-a895-ac59dc28088f also explains this, bsky.social is just the name assigned to users, each PDS has names like https://brittlegill.us-west.host.bsky.network/ (where my account is).
While you could ignore records from a specific PDS on the App layer, its pretty pointless, since atproto is portable/content addressed, meaning a user could seamlessly move to another PDS. (AP does support moving, but its pretty seamful.)
(While I was writing this someone posted a pretty good blogpost about this: https://blog.cyrneko.eu/there-is-no-bsky-social-instance)
Bluesky can censor people in turkey, this proves they're centralised!
Those posts weren't removed, people on third party bluesky apps in turkey could still see them.
People in Turkey are automatically subscribed to a Moderation Service which hides those posts, as the government requires it.
If a person unsubscribes, or uses a third party app/server the posts are still there.
Bluesky isn't decentralised as someone was banned for pointing out the head of T&S liked jailbait porn.
That person came back on a different PDS. They literally are still on bluesky because they joined a different server.
Bluesky went down due to a DDoS, this proves they are centralised!
The DDoS only crashed the Bluesky PDSes. People self hosting were fine.
Wafrn
Wafrn is a federated tumblr alternative. It started off as a tumblr clone, the dev added AP support, and eventually, Atproto support.
Its a great example of how bluesky can be built on.
If bluesky disappeared tomorrow, Wafrn could switch relays to atproto.africa, and still interact with people on other PDSes.
AppViewLite
appviewlite is a cool project I forgot to mention in the original post. It lets you self host an extremely lightweight Appview.
You can crawl PDSes yourself, eliminating the need for a relay.
https://github.com/alnkesq/AppViewLite
The main reason I made this post is because so many people are blindly anti-atproto, without fully understanding how it works and how it can be improved.
There is obviously problems with it, but it does a lot right. (There's a lot ActivityPub should do, like content addressing, DIDs and composable moderation).
I also think we could do with a better bridge. bridgy isn't really cutting it right now.
Note on did:plc, its the only centralised part of the network as of now, its essentially the underlying ID every account has. It is possible to use a did:web id instead, which is tied to a website name.