“bluesky’s mainstream decentralisation success”
Number of instances:
Mastodon: 9100+
BlueSky: 1Can you let me know how you define “decentralisation”?
https://ioc.exchange/@troed/113568167256864928
That’s intended as a barb, but it’s a good question! I randomly googled “measure of decentralisation”, expecting to find something mathematical, similar to the Gini Index. In fact all the results talk about political decentralisation: moving authority from central governments to regional governments.
This is an insight.
One of the things BlueSky is universally acknowledged as doing better than the Fediverse is their network of labellers. This is not really any useful form of decentralisation: they are all being fed by the same relay, and their output is used by the same appview. You can’t use your own independent labeller as the basis for a completely separate network.
But seen through a political lens, labellers do the most important work. They define and implement policy. Everything else in the system is a dumb pipe. Labellers are the only piece of the puzzle where an important decision must be made.
Normally with a political federation some powers are reserved for the federal government where that makes sense: national defense, immigration, foreign trade. But other powers can all be delegated, and these are usually the ones that most directly impact people’s lives: city planning, employment regulations, most taxation, services like health and education. Such a system “feels” like local control, and encourages a sense of local community. That in turn builds a culture resistant to power grabs from the central authorities. It is entirely possible to have full local autonomy, in a durable and meaningful way, without requiring every power to be fully decentralised.
By analogy, Americans would instinctively revolt against using the US military to impose an unwanted state government. (Maybe. See the stand in the schoolhouse door, in which Americans fortunately didn’t press that point.) It’s important to understand that vulnerability to power grabs is not a question of technical design, it is a question of culture. Technology or constitutions can influence culture, but it’s culture that does the real work of defending freedom.
By delegating control over labellers to independent communities, BlueSky has taken the most important step towards decentralisation in a political sense. Perhaps “really” everything is centralised. But if that infrastructure is invisible, the culture that will develop on top of it will perceive itself as decentralised. Bluesky communities that are used to defining their own boundaries on acceptable social behaviour will vigorously defend any attempt to use the infrastructure they depend on to impose central control.
I do still believe that the Fediverse is a “better” model, because it is better suited to connecting existing communities, similar to the EU, rather than simply dividing a fresh empire into rectangular provinces like the USA. The culture of the Fediverse has deeper roots that I’m confident will prove more resilient than BlueSky can be. However, I think it’s reasonable to say that Bluesky does represent a “mainstream decentralisation success”.