Re: Re: Bluesky and Decentralization

CLW with a response to Bryan Newbold's response to her post, so: "my final thoughts (for my blog at least) on Bluesky and decentralization".

tl:dr; "my assertion was that Bluesky was neither decentralized nor federated. In my opinion many of the points raised in Bryan's article solidify those arguments... [but] "credible exit" remains a "valuable value" for Bluesky".

The post also answers Bryan's request to "highlight the values of ActivityPub and Spritely... concludes ... [with] what's a positive path forward from here?", but starts with "some protocol-analysis-analysis-analysis... about the posting of and response to my original blogpost", which took her 8 hours to summarise. And she was very pleasantly surprised: "by and large [people] weren't mad!... an example where [it's] definitively not the case" that civility is dead.

Defining decentralization

Comparing definitions between the first 2 posts, she concludes that there's "general acknowledgement" that "Bluesky is not federated", and then deep dives into definitions of decentralization, finding that Mark Nottingham's definition, chosen by Newbold, was by someone "who authors standards document who would like the internet to be more decentralized where it's possible, but also operates from the "pragmatic" perspective that things are going to re-centralize most of the time anyway, and when they do this ultimately tends to be useful... the path which Mark leans most heavily into ... [is] awfully close to "credible exit"!"

The common thread through Mark to Bluesky is that "centralization actually provides a lot of features we want... and it's going to happen anyway, so what's really important is that users have the ability to move away.... [however] as a decentralization mechanism, it isn't sufficient... What's missing... is "Enable Participation". Yes, email has re-centralized. But we should be upset and alarmed that it is incredibly difficult to self-host email."

She then gets very excited as she digs back into "On Distributed Communications: I. Introduction to Distributed Communication Networks published by Paul Baran in 1964", from which Newbold's definition of decentralisation is taken, to point out that the Baran was "criticizing [the topology - Fig B in the main image] for still being centralized!... In other words:

• Contemporary nomenclature: "Centralized" and "Decentralized" as polar ends of a spectrum.
• Baran nomenclature: "Centralized and "decentralized" are both centralized topologies, but the latter is hierarchical. "Distributed" is the more robust and revolutionary view.""

Why so much depth? Because "there are great risks in moving the goalposts... "Decentralization washing" ... I don't find acceptable."

More key points

• she defends her initial point - that "message delivery requirements become quadratic at the scale of full decentralization" - with initial analyses and evidence, concluding: "the kinds of social power dynamics we can have are informed by the power dynamics of our tech and vice versa... agency depends on providers. How big do they have to be? How many of them can there be? ... for decentralization of Bluesky and ATProto to even be possible, it must change its architecture fundamentally... to become a lot more like [ActivityPub]
• she seems OK with Bryan Newbold's points about identity: "It seems like the right things are being done so that did:plc can be audited by multiple parties"
• the public nature of ATmosphere data: "users are being upset about finding out that other providers have replicated and indexed their data... [Bluesky's] approach all feels very web 2.0... the idea that society would be better if we all got everyone to talk to each other at once... But I don't think the global context-collapse firehose works, and I'm not sure it's what users want it either"

There's an interesting dive into the values underpinning Bluesky, ActivityPub and Spritely, before turning to Where to from here?

--- tbc ---