Bluesky managed to go offline practically entirely. I count on you folks to spork the hell out of this.
See also here.
Eh, I feel like the important part of decentralization right now is the potential to migrate.
Like, how many social media sites actually last 5 years before shitting the bed?
If admins of an instance get shitty, it’s trivial to move to a new one. Traditional social media you’d have to migrate to a completely different site, with different features, layout, and other stuff.
People won’t all wait for the same reason, as the biggest becomes actually “big” we’ll see them start to fracture.
There just wasn’t enough people on fediverse to start out like that.
So think of Blue sky, World, and all those other “big” instances that still don’t have that many users as the egg for the future fediverse that actually has enough users to be proper decentralized
Is migrating really practical? Will your followers automatically follow you on your new server?
On Mastodon yes, it is also compatible with a few other software like Akkoma. Your followers will get a notification that you moved and will automatically follow the new account. Works very seamlessly in my experience.
On Mastodon it’s very easy and it brings your followers over
Based on https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/14/24296537/bluesky-acting-up-outage-down it was down for 15-30 minutes and for some it was just read-only.
Lemmy instances regularly go down for maintenance longer than this.
Twitter used to regularly “fail whale” and in the long run no one cares.
Yes, decentralizing is a good thing. Yes, it’s fun to poke at BlueSky. But in the long run if you have a product that people want to use then they’ll put up with a lot of crap/downtime.
The point is that bluesky has no interest in being actually decentralized, it’s just a gimmick
Yeah because decentralization is just a gimmick. It sounds cool on paper, but in reality it doesn’t solve many problems - it just introduces many others. The only situation where it helps is if an instance goes down permanently, and even then it’s not that helpful.
Decentralization greatly decreases vendor lock-in, lessens the damage of a single actor and adds competition. These are serious long-term benefits for a service and its users.
There’s a reason why something like email is still around and being innovated on 40 years later, while its proprietary competitors are long since dead. And it’s not that the technology is very good.
Bluesky is just another ICQ/AIM/Slashdot/Digg, a little walled garden that will eventually be ran into the ground. Which is fine. The issue is that it’s trying to embrace and extinguish the fediverse by pretending to be decentralized.
At this point, anything that hurts Twitter is good. Bluesky may go down in two years, but if twitter dies in one, I’ll be happy. People need to learn to jump platforms again.
