I think people don’t have a particularly solid grasp of why you’d want “decentralization”. Or at least I don’t agree with the common take.
Admittedly the common take seems to be decentralization is important because more decentralization is more better, as far as I can tell. Personally, I don’t think there’s intrinsic value in decentralization, the value is in the functionality. Decentralization is a bit like the right to strike. It’s super imporant to have. You don’t want to not have it. You only use it if you need it, though.
The point of decentralization or interoperability is supposed to be that if there is a dealbreaking choice you can move the whole setup to somewhere that is not making that choice. But beyond that scenario, having one big thing is often going to be more practical than having many tiny ones. There is no real value in everybody hosting a tiny instance of a thing. It’ll be less reliable and massively less efficient than a large consolidated host.
To put it another way, the difference between having one person controlling a service and having two people controlling a service is huge. Fundamental. Changes the whole game. The difference between a million people controlling a service and two million controlling a service is negligible. There is no effective competition between a bunch of similar computers all running the same software.
the difference between having one person controlling a service and having two people controlling a service is huge
If the control is split 50:50, then yes. If the control is split 99.5% to 0.5%, the difference is negligible.
That’s the part where we disagree and I disagree with the group.
I think the argument that spinning up a full Bluesky replacement is too expensive is valid. I think the argument that the central Bluesky service being the majority of the landscape is a bad thing is not.
If someone can spin up a replacement, even at great cost, it means that if and when the service gets bad in the main instance people can create a different big replacement. Whatever made the original viable remains in place, so the incentives should be the same.
That is the big difference between two being possible or not. Especially if, like AT does, you have proper account migration (still a glaring gap in Fedi services).
You don’t need a lot of decentralization for that to be true. Way I see it, the obsession with this particular metric is a purity test used as a marketing tool between competitor more than anything else. That pisses me off quite a bit because, frankly, I’m very tired of all the endless infighting in all the progessive spaces, from Linux development to FOSS in general to alternate social media to straight up left-wing politics. It sucks a lot and I don’t particularly respect anyone who engages with it.
If someone can spin up a replacement, even at great cost, it means that if and when the service gets bad in the main instance people can create a different big replacement. Whatever made the original viable remains in place, so the incentives should be the same.
That assumes that the biggest player keeps playing by the established rules even after deteriorating otherwise. But if the biggest player controls virtually the entire market, they can change the rules at will.
For instance, let’s say BlueSky suddenly switches to a new protocol, which happens to be proprietary (or they extend AT in a proprietary manner that breaks compatibility). Can you still offer a competing AT service? Sure. But the 90+ % of users who are on BlueSky aren’t going to drop everything to switch to your service, which has virtually no users or content, just because you use the protocol BlueSky used to use. Most users are there for the content, not because of the technical implementation.
That’s the point of the whole federalized service thing: To keep one single party from being able to dictate terms to everyone. But just like in any market, that relies upon no one having an overwhelming market share. Right now, BlueSky has an overwhelming market share. They currently aren’t abusing it but they have the power to do so.
That makes no sense. How is that any different from forking out of Fedi apps? This has happened a ton of times.
Look, I don’t mean to dump specifically on you, but I do hate this slippery slope fallacy crap, and you hear it a ton in these circles. What if Bluesky decides to defederate from itself or stop using an open protocol? Well then that’s bad. Also it hasn’t happened, there’s no indication that will happen and it would make no sense for it to happen considering Bluesky made AT willingly and could have just… not done that in the first place.
I mean, what if Mastodon.social defederates and stops using AP? What then? Huh? Well, nothing because it hasn’t happened it’s unlikely to happen and if it did the rest of the space would have to reconfigure around it.
I swear, we need to stop this. The small fish infighting is such a great way to keep the big fish in place. If you want to get depressed at the ability of more open alternatives to be functional in general, the insane fact that only BS managed to sorta capitalize on Twitter and then Twitter managed to keep itself in place and recover is a massive failure. We should all be doing a lot of soul-searching about how badly we suck at organizing and pushing a cohesive message because man, did they try hard to fail and we just wouldn’t let them.
