Bluesky and the AT Protocol: Usable Decentralized Social Media · HackerPapers discussions

Bluesky and the AT Protocol: Usable Decentralized Social Media — mentioned by rimunroe

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 15:58:09 GMT

> If by "decentralised" you mean "0.001% of it is not only hosted centrally" Sure, much like how email is decentralized in theory but barely is in practice. This doesn’t mean that the decentralized nature is just a marketing gimmick. It’s unsurprising that almost everyone uses the Bluesky app given that A) the infrastructure for hosting your own relay or app view (I can’t remember which) didn’t have a reference implementation until a while after launch, and B) the user base is much less tech-y than what I’ve seen on Mastodon. Most of the user base moved over in the flight from Twitter/X a…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Bluesky and the AT Protocol: Usable Decentralized Social Media — mentioned by steveklabnik

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 21:33:46 GMT

I believe that https://gitlab.com/bluesky-community1/decentralized-ecosyste... is the canonical link, it's not the one I read originally, but is linked from the "related work" section of https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.03239

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Bluesky and the AT Protocol: Usable Decentralized Social Media — mentioned by anon7000

Sat, 26 Apr 2025 18:54:44 GMT

No. This isn’t true. Bluesky has always been very transparent about exactly what flavor of decentralization they offer. The whole thing is swappable microservices you can host yourself, including the relay if you really care. The relay is an optimization to make their app offering work in a performant, scalable way. The relay is described here and here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.03239, https://atproto.com/guides/glossary#relay The protocol Bluesky is built on is certainly decentralized. It’s really fucking annoying that people act like it’s not “real” decentralization, when in fact it’s just…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Bluesky and the AT Protocol: Usable Decentralized Social Media — mentioned by GaryNumanVevo

Mon, 09 Sep 2024 11:59:51 GMT

Yes and no. The relay is run by Bluesky, but only as a matter of practicality because it requires a large footprint to subscribe to all the PDS events. Others have written custom AppViews and clients already. I run a "one man relay" that only scrapes my PDS, puts it into an appview (which doesn't do much) and I can see that on a basic client that I wrote. The whitepaper clarifies a lot of this: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03239

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Bluesky and the AT Protocol: Usable Decentralized Social Media — mentioned by danabramov

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 22:00:07 GMT

> sound more like 'custom feeds' which users can define based on global content, using predefined criteria determined by a client (web app) which don't really a way to control the behavior of. Which makes this feature only truly operate on the global layer, and 'custom' rather than 'composable'. To be clear, custom feeds aren’t defined in the client app. Anyone can run a custom feed on their own server and with arbitrary logic. A custom feed subscribes to a global firehose (which could also be run by a third party) and uses the stream of the events in the network to produce its results. A…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Bluesky and the AT Protocol: Usable Decentralized Social Media — mentioned by unshavedyak

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 20:11:04 GMT

I don't know enough about it to give feedback. However Martin Kleppmann's[1] involvement is a huge selling point to me. It's also, seemingly, good enough that they're building very useful things on top of it like PDS, migrating users, etc. ActivityPub (AP) felt a bit like "good enough to get something done", which is amazing on one hand - people can do a lot with it. But it also means some harder problems are totally ignored[2], so the landscape between instances felt rocky to me. I also heavily disliked how federation worked in AP, ie how the protocol felt like it favored centralized…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Bluesky and the AT Protocol: Usable Decentralized Social Media — mentioned by jakebsky

Tue, 06 Feb 2024 15:26:43 GMT

This is a big milestone for Bluesky! We've had the federation sandbox running for over six months but we're now able to commit to open federation on the production network this month as well. There's also stackable moderation coming shortly, which enables other individuals/orgs to operate moderation labeling services that users can choose to use. The technical challenges of setting up an (efficiently) scalable decentralized social network were quite interesting. The infrastructure itself is quite decentralized, with standalone PDS instances and two small shared-nothing datacenter PoPs. We're…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Bluesky and the AT Protocol: Usable Decentralized Social Media — HN submission

Tue, 06 Feb 2024 15:25:33 GMT

Bluesky and the AT Protocol: Usable decentralized social media

245 points; 276 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.