2025-04-26 10:32:55
The view from Queens. Kind of a wild few days of driving now that I reflect on it.
2025-04-26 02:48:23
My post earlier today about Bluesky seems to have spread more widely than I expected. Lots of feedback! Looking at it again, the analogy with Google was confusing, and the post title with “downtime” set the wrong expectation… It was supposed to be a more positive, hopeful post.
2025-04-25 22:03:10
Catching up on last night’s NBA scores. I watched some of Knicks / Pistons, but staying up on east coast time for west games is tough. Thunder are a force, will be difficult to get by them. 🏀
2025-04-25 21:38:38
Bluesky was down last night and I saw a couple posts questioning how this could happen if it was really decentralized. Worth a few thoughts here.
If mastodon.social went down, what would the user sentiment be? It hosts 2.7 million users, or roughly 15% of the fediverse. (Not counting Threads because Meta doesn’t publish their data.) While down, users on mastodon.social wouldn’t be able to interact with the fediverse or download a copy of their posts.
This is best illustrated with this humorous Mastodon critique from Rob Shearer:
M: You start by choosing an instance. But the important thing is it doesn’t matter because all instances are federated and you can migrate between instances.
U: So if the instance I chose gets shut down I can migrate to another?
M: No.
Even so, if a single very large Mastodon server went down, no one would use it to question whether Mastodon is decentralized, other than as a reminder that smaller communities are often better and make the network more resilient. Likewise, it’s not really fair to frame bsky.social as merely a large server; it’s effectively the only thing right now, which isn’t true for mastodon.social.
With AT Protocol, it’s possible to host your posts outside of Bluesky. Very few people do this, but it will become more common as third-party hosting services (like Micro.blog) support it. In that case, if bsky.social or bsky.app went down, you could still access your posts.
When you call the Bluesky API via bsky.social, it actually proxies your requests to the appropriate backend data server if it’s hosted on Bluesky. This makes the API feel very centralized, but all of the data could still be accessed directly in a more distributed way, like accessing individual websites.
Bluesky is not federated like Mastodon, but the open architecture that Bluesky was designed around is valuable. It is distributed sort of like the web is distributed even though Google exists and dominates search. Eventually, there will be other AppViews that work like Bluesky but run in parallel with their own timeline. In that case, if Bluesky went down, some other apps might still function, and could utilize the same data and social graph.
We need to move beyond a Mastodon vs. Bluesky mindset. As I’ve blogged several times, they are solving slightly different problems. We can draw inspiration from each one to make the web more open. I want both to exist.
Update: Tweaked a couple references to how PDSes work to reflect feedback in comments.
2025-04-25 20:18:33
If you’re following the last few photos I’ve posted, my daughter and I have been slowly making our way to New York. Surprisingly the first time I’ve ever driven through a few states: Virginia, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Road trips are usually out west. 🚙