Returning to the #FreeOurFeeds (FOF) initiative discussion (for background see links below)...
@pluralistic has a new piece (https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/20/capitalist-unrealism/) that extends his "fire exit" analogy and discusses how it is not corporate ownership, VCs or profit motive alone that causes enshitification. It also requires captive users, and FOF will make it so Bluesky users are not captive. It all sounds good, but it's not realistic because the assumptions behind it are based on vaporware marketing.
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Somewhere in the 1980s software companies discovered that they could announce products with fabulous features long before they were developed as a means of getting potential customers to delay purchase decisions for their competitors actual real products. The term 'vaporware' came to refer to these schemes. Over the years vaporware has evolved to be used for all sorts of clever market manipulations and you could say that most of Silicon Valley now runs on vaporware.
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Sometimes vaporware products actually get made with a small subset of the promised features, but more often they just continue to get delayed serving their market manipulative purpose. One thing about vaporware products is that there is no shortage of complex and detailed descriptions of what they WILL DO.
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Enter Bluesky and the AT protocol. We are told it is a simple matter to make Bluesky distributed. All we need to do is make another 'relay'. Seems easy, right. But Bluesky hasn't done this yet because [insert reason here]. Enter FOF, who figures, well Bluesky won't build a second relay with their technology, we will do it!
Do you see the problem here? Maybe, building complex undeveloped, unproven, untested relays is a huge engineering challenge. Maybe it's impossible.
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@mastodonmigration @pluralistic Why would you expect Bluesky to create a second relay? They already have one.
The entire point about relays is that to keep the ATverse federated, independent relays should exist. It has to be a third party that creates the next relay.
@mastodonmigration @pluralistic As to why there isn't a second relay - well, it's a design flaw that there's no incentive to create one, and that's a legit criticism of AT. But a non-profit creating one to support the network is definitely one way to get a second relay.
Would expect them to build "a second relay' because that would prove it was possible to do so.
Let's be clear, we are using the term 'create a relay' here to mean actually create whatever technology is needed to make the AT Protocol distributed at scale, in a production environment. So far, Bluesky has demonstrated that they have a centralized social media platform that can accommodate 10s of millions of users.
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@mastodonmigration @pluralistic They don't need to build a second relay to prove it's possible to build a relay, no. They just need to build one, which they did.
Unfortunately, that's not how it works.
@mastodonmigration @pluralistic Yes, that's exactly how it works.
Bluesky is an active, up and running, social network that's built upon the three technologies that make up AT. It currently has something in the region of 30 million users, 3.5 million of which are active.
Saying they haven't "proven" that they can build a relay is essentially a ludicrous moon-landing-hoax level conspiracy theory at this point.
No. They have proven they can build a centralized system that services 30 million people. They have not proven that the system can be distributed at scale. That is a complex engineering matter even if the underlying protocol was designed with this intention.
All this talk of 'relays' is just pseudo technical descriptions to make it seem like it is less complicated than it is to actually create such a big distributed networked system.
@mastodonmigration @pluralistic All of the other components (PDSes, App Views, etc) have been replicated in some way and are somehow able to talk to this "only works if it's centralized" relay? That's what you're claiming?
Like I said earlier, there's a clear, logical, reason why there's only one relay: there's no incentive to run one, and they're expensive to run. There is NOTHING exotic and hard about the concept. (1/2)
@mastodonmigration @pluralistic
But sure, it can't be that, it must be that Bluesky are lying and haven't really created a relay at all! The messages are flowing from PDSes to App Views etc via some... uh... magic? A room full of squirrels?
This is just silly. Especially when it'd be easier to build one than to fake building one. (2/2)
So you get the last word. Don't feel like we are making any progress and your tone is becoming sarcastic and hostile, so exiting the conversation.
@mastodonmigration @pluralistic Sorry if I come across that way. I'm just increasingly bewildered. There's huge criticisms one can make of the Relay concept, notably the lack of incentives to run one and the huge amount of resources needed. But you're focusing instead on an assertion instead that makes no sense. Yes, a relay exists!
Incidentally, after reading up on it, I found that you weren't even right claiming Bluesky hadn't stood up a second one. They did just that: https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3kwzl7tye6u2y
@mastodonmigration @pluralistic But regardless, they do actually have a relay. It's not fake. It's not made up. It's a relay capable of managing the 3M/30M users of Bluesky right now. You can prove it exists by using a third party App View to access a third party PDS.
@mastodonmigration @pluralistic And remember, each Relay manages its own data. It doesn't talk to other Relays, it just finds PDSes and crawls them, and answers queries as it gets them from App Views. So it's not like this is a complicated networking thing that'll suddenly fail if there are 256 relays or anything like that. Each is 100% independent from one another.
@mastodonmigration @pluralistic What's needed is not proof that one can exist, but for indepedent replication of all of Bluesky's components so that more AT protocol people are not using Bluesky's PDSes, App Views, and (indirectly) relays, than are. That'll ensure the network stays safe and open going forward. And that, not "Bluesky doesn't really have a relay", is the real thing to put pressure on here.