by jchw | 2025-08-31 18:05:19+00:00
The issue is that Bluesky did their big public launch long before anyone could even run their own PDSes. Instead, they spent a bunch of time working on shit like integrating Namecheap for DIDs. And if you use Bluesky to go and create a DID and set up a domain for it... it will be a centralized DID managed by plc.directory, which is also ran by Bluesky Social PBC, and you can't run your own equivalent of plc.directory, and the alternative DID method that is still supported is used by basically nobody.

Technically people can run their own components for most things, but everyone just knows bsky.app. What's the point? You're never beating them in Google Search. You're never gaining critical mass. People are just going to be really confused at why there are multiple domains that have the same content, and I imagine search indexes will be confused by that, too, probably massively deranking any of the alternatives.

This all makes running your own Bluesky components pretty self-defeating. You can go through all of the effort to have parallel infrastructure for Bluesky, only for an AppView that is doomed to be irrelevant. 99.99% of everyone you interact with is on Bluesky Social PBC's centralized infrastructure anyways and there's basically no chance of that changing. And unlike Bluesky, you don't have shit loads of investor money to spend, certainly not the $15 million that Blockchain Capital invested in Bluesky Social PBC last year.

I think Bluesky Social PBC was well aware of all of this and chose to launch this way anyways, because they absolutely did not have decentralization as a priority. And yes, I know that users on Hacker News are screaming at the top of their lungs, "Users shouldn't care! Users shouldn't care!" But guess what, Users actually cared. People were pissed off about Twitter and wanted a durable alternative that wasn't plagued by the fact that someone could just buy it and take control over the whole platform. Bluesky Social PBC sold Bluesky as a better decentralized alternative to Twitter.

For all of this performative effort though, it's all worthless. Someone could buy Bluesky and immediately close all of the doors; stop allowing new external PDSes and start closing off access to relays/etc. from anyone else. There's not really any reason to actually do that right now, since decentralization is not even a threat to Bluesky Social PBC's control over the network, and unless someone shows up with millions of dollars to blow on a network they don't even have the benefit of being the public face of, they really never have to worry about it anyways.

I criticized a lot of aspects of the Fediverse for a long time, but at least the Fediverse actually delivered on one thing: it actually really is practically decentralized, with all of the ups and downs that that comes with. Users are distributed across instances, so there is no central gatekeeper that would stop me from talking with them. You can almost always avoid any instance-related drama by just running your own instance and interacting from there, if you want. Bluesky will never have that. For Bluesky, users that Bluesky Social PBC doesn't like will be invisible to the vast majority of the rest of the network.

And I'm sorry, but that's not what a decentralized network looks like.