wrote up a reply to @cwebber's "How decentralized is Bluesky really" blog post:
@bnewbold @cwebber > The bar we are shooting for is to convince people that atproto is legitimate and useful even if Bluesky and the team adopt the worst of intentions.
Oof, that's a high bar. The protocol itself may still be technically useful, sure, but Bluesky could tomorrow block access to its PDS and relays, disallow migrations, stop digesting data from other PDSes or even completely drop atproto - and the vast majority of now locked-in users wouldn't notice.
@dos @bnewbold @cwebber I'm not going to get into an argument about it because I don't think there's anything the Bluesky devs could say other than "we're working on it" so I don't think it would be productive. But there is a cultural element here that gets ignored in discussions of credible exits.
I've had critters tell me "things will get decentralized if the company goes bad."
No, what will happen if it's still centralized at that point, is that the users will join Threads.
@dos @bnewbold @cwebber There would not be a mass-exodus from Bluesky if they turned off reading from 3rd-party PDSes. Even if the platform became really bad.
None of the artist communities I'm a part of know what these words are or what they mean - on purpose!
And there's legitimacy to building a network that Just Works, but the community I see is not going to become suddenly amiable to learning what those words mean if something goes wrong. They'll either stay or use another centralized app
@foxyoreos @bnewbold @cwebber Yeah, I mean, if mastodon.social decides to lock their users up, people there will lose access to about 70% of the current network - that's disruptive enough to stir things up. If Bluesky does it, it will be day as usual, aside of some nerds like us getting somewhat angry for a while. You get permissionless backup of the old network, but all the people you used to follow are now closed in a silo anyway and they'll stay there until they get other reasons to leave.
@dos @bnewbold @cwebber Bluesky could come out with a perfect decentralized tech stack with zero silos that fulfills every promise of credible exit, but I am skeptical that even they could get their users now to use it.
What could they do? Force users to self-host? Their network wouldn't survive.
But again, I don't know if that's necessarily worth arguing about because.. I don't know, it's a more fundamental complaint than figuring out what design decisions they're making about the tech.
@dos @bnewbold @cwebber Part of the reason why I'm critical of .social (despite breaking and eventually making a secondary account there) is that decentralizing an already centralized userbase is extremely hard. It's why it's important to get users to use diverse instances from the start.
I will be thrilled if Bluesky proves me wrong, but I don't know how you decentralize almost all of your users after the fact.