tidderuuf@lemmy.world
on 07 Sep 17:00
nextcollapse
Author: points out how Bluesky is not decentralized.
Also Author: only points out how people are arguing about how Bluesky is decentralized.
Author: Mission Accomplished.
hendrik@palaver.p3x.de
on 07 Sep 17:05
nextcollapse
Since we have Mississippi as an example... Why not just look how it turned out for the people there? Do or don't they have a communications platform now that connects them to a network of other people? I feel that's way more helpful than discussing what should be discussed, or talking about theoretical details.
irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 08 Sep 17:11
collapse
If they use deer.social or zeppelin.social (alternate bluesky instances), they can evade the bans and blocks.
Ah, thanks. And are those people then connected to the same network and can follow each other, or are those entirely seperate? Pardon my lack of knowledge about Bluesky and ATProto.
irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 08 Sep 17:37
collapse
Bluesky’s network has 2 main layers, the PDS layer, and the appview layer.
Everyone’s PDS stores their posts, likes and account, and handles authentication.
It doesn’t do anything else. an appview gathers posts from PDSes, and indexes and sorts them (for feeds and notifications).
AppViews all share the same posts, so they’re in the same network.
unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de
on 07 Sep 17:31
nextcollapse
I will continue to point it out as long as people keep recommending it. Its not a minor complaint or a small point of disagreement, its a complete deal breaker that makes the platform worthless to invest any time in. No matter how much time passes it will always be a shit platform as long as its centralized.
Also bluesky isnt part of the fediverse so this doesnt even really belong in here…
airportline@lemmy.zip
on 07 Sep 17:57
nextcollapse
Also bluesky isnt part of the fediverse so this doesnt even really belong in here…
There are four other posts about Bluesky or ATProto on the front page of !fediverse@lemmy.world (when viewed from lemmy.zip), so I guessed otherwise.
go to https://reddwarf.whey.party and all requests will be made to Constellation (a hobby project which tracks backlinks of records, which is completely independent of Bluesky PBC), the PDSes directly, and Bluesky's CDN (which is negligible since a CDN can be an easy replacement on a small scale)
unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de
on 08 Sep 06:32
collapse
99.99% of users on bluesky.social = centralized no matter what cute little toys people built on the side
alsaaas@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 07 Sep 18:27
nextcollapse
There is a difference between providing services to fund development and “We take VC capital now and try to make it profitable later”, which just invites enshittification.
Also Matrix is much better federated than BS + everything is open and was so for a long time
Slightly better you mean. 30% is on matrix.org and an estimated 70% runs on servers provided by EMS (this figure includes matrix.org).
And Matrix is also VC funded. They have some other income yes, but it is insufficient to fund many of their current activities. As a result enshittification is already happening.
Matrix is basically the Bluesky of chat. If you want an Fediverse equivalent have a look at XMPP/Jabber.
They’re not, to my knowledge, but also, to my knowledge, they have no plan for profitability. They’re a domain registrar and they sell merch but there’s no way that’s paying for all that infra for 12M users.
omniman@anarchist.nexus
on 07 Sep 18:17
nextcollapse
there is blacksky and others which are making app for atprotocol soo its decentralized
What does that enable? Could people in states blocked by the main network use it through these?
airportline@lemmy.zip
on 07 Sep 23:32
nextcollapse
Could people in states blocked by the main network use it through these?
Yes, and they wouldn’t even need to migrate their accounts to do so (although they probably should).
irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 08 Sep 17:12
collapse
People with bsky.social accounts can evade the bans by using: deer.social, zeppelin.social and blacksky.community, without even having to migrate their accounts.
I want all my greens on Mastodon instead of Bluesky.
lavember@programming.dev
on 07 Sep 18:19
nextcollapse
Thats the article? What? Its just a big nothing burger
Corgana@startrek.website
on 07 Sep 19:03
nextcollapse
I haven’t seen much arguing, it is unquestionably centralized and for profit. There truly is nothing unique about it.
I’m not an expert with the AT protocol but it really seems like what Dorsey and co have made is a super complicated protocol that (under specific conditions that cannot exist in the real world), has the potential to be federated in a meaningful way. That way they can steal all the talking points of the fediverse and muddy the meaning of words.
There are also a lot of people on Fedi who will seek out threads like these to explain how line 2532 of the AT protocol handbook explains how having 100% of users on a single server is actually decentralized but I’m sure they’re all authentic accounts.
"super complicated" it's really not, just nobody on the Fediverse wants to spend 2 seconds looking into it to realize it's pros and cons over the Fediverse.
"steal all the talking points of the fediverse" you sound hostile af
its not hostile to suggest that the crypto bros running bluesky would openwash their true intentions
irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 08 Sep 17:10
collapse
Hey, the at protocol is pretty simple really.
Essentially, the network has three main parts:
PDSes: These are “dumb” data stores. The do not do anything except store data and handle authentication. Your account “lives” on them, but you can migrate between them seamlessly, and keep your data when you migrate.
Relays: These connect to PDSes over websocket and store all the data from them. They provide a “firehose” of data through websockets. The advantage of relays is that there is far less missing information than on the fediverse.
AppViews: These connect to relays and take the posts. They sort through the data and only keep what is relevant for them.
For example, bsky.app is an appview. It connects to the bolson.bsky.dev relay, and only takes objects that have an app.bsky.* nsid/type. frontpage.fyi is another one, it connects to the relay1.us-west.bsky.network relay, it ignores all posts that except for ones with fyi.frontpage.* nsids, and that are too long.
This approach is way better than activitypub.
Relays aren’t necessary, nor expensive to run (anymore). For example, appviewlite can be run easily, and can be configured to crawl PDSes itself, rather than using a relay.
It has the potential to be federated in a meaningful way in the real world right now.
I’m not going to deny that most people using bluesky’s servers is a problem, because it is.
Jack Dorsey wasn’t very involved in bluesky, and isn’t involved at all anymore. He left the board and deleted his account after they did moderation.
Bluesky, right now, is federated in a meaningful way. Whether or not it’s decentralised only depends on your definition of the word at this point.
Also: the people who work at bluesky, right now, have very good intentions. I don’t really think any are crypto-bros. The main problem is investors trying to claw back some value after they invested in it.
Yes, as soon as 99%+ of the users aren’t on the same server. That’s the bottom line. We can argue theory all day but it doesn’t change the implications of centralization.
Over the last few weeks hundreds of people have moved their accounts to the new blacksky.app PDS, and they’re running an early version of their app at blacksky.community
I’ve spent…quite a bit of time intentionally looking for alternative ATP servers and this is the first time I’ve heard of this. And I’m balls deep in this stuff. I even run my own AP server. So I’d say it’s so obscure as to be meaningless.
99.99% of the users are still on infrastructure run by Bluesky PBC…but looking at all the progress and activity, it sure seems to me that’s in the process of changing.
My guy. LOL. No. Just no. It isn’t.
so many people in the Fediverse present the fact that 99.99% of Bluesky users are still using infrastructrure run by Bluesky PBC as if it’s a gotcha
I mean…yeah? It is.
They just prefer to invest their time and energy in working to improve the situation
And we prefer to invest our time and energy into supporting an actually decentralized protocol.
rather than arguing about the semantics of “decentralization.”
Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com
on 07 Sep 20:44
nextcollapse
Well 25% is very strict, pretty sure mastodon.social is more than that for the Fediverse (I do wish other instances would grow faster to catch up)
But yea anything higher than 50% is kinda missing the point, ideally they would close signups and suggest people signup on alternative instances instead
irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 08 Sep 16:52
collapse
Alternate ATP servers:
altq.net: PDS
app.wafrn.net: pds and appview
atproto.africa: alt relay
zeppelin.social: alt appview
blacksky.app: alternate PDS
blacksky.community: alternate appview
witchcraft.systems: alt pds
sprk.so: alt pds, plans on hosting an appview
gander.socialgandersocial.ca : canadian PDS, appview in plans
arankwende.com: open-signup PDS
atproto.hotwaru.com: open-signup PDS
bsky.aenead.net: open-signup PDS
casjay.social: open-signup PDs
deer.social: alt-client
Honourable mention to AppViewLite which lets you easily and cheaply host an appview yourself. I can run it on my laptop easily. It doesn’t depend on relays, it can crawls PDSes directly.
can anyone recommend a good read into the actual developments happening with ATproto as of late? i've seen a lot of insisting lately that things are changing/have changed but no one's saying what exactly is or has changed
The most interesting development as of late is the progress of Blacksky. It is the first major attempt at creating an independent “Bluesky Instance”–where in that it’s functionally the same as Bluesky but doesn’t rely on any of Bluesky’s infrastructure.
There is also Wafrn, which is really hard to explain. @gabboman@app.wafrn.net is in this thread somewhere and will have to explain it.
Not really that hard to explain, unless I'm missing your point. Wafrn is a federated Tumblr-like platform that allows two-way interaction with Bluesky users (without the need for bridging).
There’s way more to Wafrn than that, and it’s extremely interesting.
You can treat Wafrn like an independent ATProto platform (like Blacksky). It has its own PDS and AppView (which uses Blacksky’s Relay), so it’s not at all dependent on Bluesky for obtaining posts (assuming those posts are also published on an independent PDS).
What’s unique is that Wafrn is actually ActivityPub-first, meaning it doesn’t have any issue interacting with Mastodon users, but doesn’t have all the same features of a normal ATProto platform. For example must have your account on Wafrn in order to use it (as opposed to blacksky.community, which lets you sign in with an existing account on another ATProto platform); you can, however, sign into bsky.app (or blacksky) with an account created on Wafrn.
unknown1234_5@kbin.earth
on 07 Sep 22:03
nextcollapse
bluesky is technically decentralized, but the way it does it makes self-hosting all but impossible due to storage requirements. because of that, it really isnt. its like how a lot of ai models are 'open-source' even though the training data isnt available and the ai is still effectively a black box. it isnt decentralized unless anyone can make an instance, just like how it isnt open-source unless you have access to everything that makes it work (yes, by this definition chromium and android aren't truly open-source, and I stand by that).
this is literally the exact same for the fediverse. it is near impossible to own your data. if you want to own your data, you have to own others' data, and you're practically isolated in a black box unless you spam hashtags and spam follow people.
big instances still have a massive control over the entirety of the fediverse for whatever category (e.g. micro-blogging) they are in
More importantly it’s for-profit capitalist crap? With ethical and moral considerations, there is no reason to push this when there are alternatives with much better starting blocks.
It’s a benefit corporation which means the board has to consider the benefit to society, employees, etc.
theacharnian@lemmy.ca
on 08 Sep 12:35
nextcollapse
Centralization on its own is not a deal breaker. Wikipedia is centralized.
Corporate/business ownership on it’s own is not a deal breaker. There are many business mastodon instances: mastodonservers.net/servers/business
It’s the combination that is a deal breaker. Corporate AND centralized. We’ve seen this movie before. It’s a predictably boring story that ends with enshittification.
Agreeish? (M)any one of us can download wikipedia. Does that still make it centralized when it is designed to be distributed that easily? That design choice is baked into the ethos. Centralized vs. Decentralized seems not to be binary.
theacharnian@lemmy.ca
on 08 Sep 13:42
nextcollapse
But once you download It, any changes you make are only local. You cannot edit wikipedia using a non-wikipedia account (sure you can edit anonymously but then your IP functions as your account) and the articles are not systematically stored in different wikipedia instances. There is one Wikipedia.
By the way, centralized doesn’t mean “walled off”.
Once you download wikipedia, you can edit it and distribute. Other people with their own copies can merge your changes into theirs, or you can push your changes upstream. Even if they need to be signed to accepted. Doesn’t that make Wikipedia more like the Linux Kernel and less like The Encyclopedia Britannica? Sure, for the kernel there is a “main and central” repo, but the whole point of git is that it isn’t centralized. It’s distributed.
In fact, in a loose way, wikipedia meets the criteria of Free Software. You can:
Read the source code
Modify the source code
Distribute the source code
Distribute your modifications to the source code
edit: wikipedia is predominately licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA) and the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL)
Sure but I don’t think that makes it “decentralized” it makes it as you correctly point out, open source. Those are orthogonal categories.There aren’t parts of wikipedia that are hosted in other wikipedia instances that talk to each other the same way mastodon does. There is a unique, central, Wikipedia.
irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 08 Sep 16:41
collapse
You can download all of bluesky easily through the firehose, and it is federated.
Kirk@startrek.website
on 08 Sep 16:14
nextcollapse
I agree with your overall point, but Wikipedia has a singular mission. Social settings can have wildy different missions from shitposting, to hobbies, study groups, to support groups, etc. There is no singular moderation ethos that can apply to all of them, that’s why decentralization is important in social media.
We want to algorithms to work for the people, not have people slaving for the algorithms.
Of course I agree that decentralization for social media is hugely important. I’m just pointing out that there can exist use cases where centralization makes sense and/or is not a problem.
threaded - newest
Author: points out how Bluesky is not decentralized.
Also Author: only points out how people are arguing about how Bluesky is decentralized.
Author: Mission Accomplished.
Since we have Mississippi as an example... Why not just look how it turned out for the people there? Do or don't they have a communications platform now that connects them to a network of other people? I feel that's way more helpful than discussing what should be discussed, or talking about theoretical details.
If they use deer.social or zeppelin.social (alternate bluesky instances), they can evade the bans and blocks.
Ah, thanks. And are those people then connected to the same network and can follow each other, or are those entirely seperate? Pardon my lack of knowledge about Bluesky and ATProto.
Bluesky’s network has 2 main layers, the PDS layer, and the appview layer.
Everyone’s PDS stores their posts, likes and account, and handles authentication.
It doesn’t do anything else. an appview gathers posts from PDSes, and indexes and sorts them (for feeds and notifications).
AppViews all share the same posts, so they’re in the same network.
I will continue to point it out as long as people keep recommending it. Its not a minor complaint or a small point of disagreement, its a complete deal breaker that makes the platform worthless to invest any time in. No matter how much time passes it will always be a shit platform as long as its centralized.
Also bluesky isnt part of the fediverse so this doesnt even really belong in here…
There are four other posts about Bluesky or ATProto on the front page of !fediverse@lemmy.world (when viewed from lemmy.zip), so I guessed otherwise.
I think the sidebar clarifies it pretty well
Yeah and “but other people are doing it” is not a valid excuse lol
That is exactly what I meant, just because other people are doing it too, it doesn’t stop you from reading the sidebar
it's not centralized
go to https://reddwarf.whey.party and all requests will be made to Constellation (a hobby project which tracks backlinks of records, which is completely independent of Bluesky PBC), the PDSes directly, and Bluesky's CDN (which is negligible since a CDN can be an easy replacement on a small scale)
99.99% of users on bluesky.social = centralized no matter what cute little toys people built on the side
I have no idea what this means or what Bluesky is, so yes. I’m happy to continue not knowing or talking about it.
If you don’t want to hear any criticism, stop bringing up pseudo-decentralized corpo VC-backed Twitter 2.0
:3
what about matrix , they also do business
There is a difference between providing services to fund development and “We take VC capital now and try to make it profitable later”, which just invites enshittification.
Also Matrix is much better federated than BS + everything is open and was so for a long time
Slightly better you mean. 30% is on matrix.org and an estimated 70% runs on servers provided by EMS (this figure includes matrix.org).
And Matrix is also VC funded. They have some other income yes, but it is insufficient to fund many of their current activities. As a result enshittification is already happening.
Matrix is basically the Bluesky of chat. If you want an Fediverse equivalent have a look at XMPP/Jabber.
Matrix.org is VC funded (which is why it will go freemium soon AFAIK) and not 99% is on Matrix.org as you mentioned
I can freely and easily federate with any other homeserver to matrix.org
I can freely and easily federate with *.bsky.network and bsky.app.
Matrix has a profitable business model that doesn’t involve exploiting users. BlueSky doesn’t.
may I ask how users are being exploited at this current moment?
They’re not, to my knowledge, but also, to my knowledge, they have no plan for profitability. They’re a domain registrar and they sell merch but there’s no way that’s paying for all that infra for 12M users.
there is blacksky and others which are making app for atprotocol soo its decentralized
What does that enable? Could people in states blocked by the main network use it through these?
Yes, and they wouldn’t even need to migrate their accounts to do so (although they probably should).
People with bsky.social accounts can evade the bans by using: deer.social, zeppelin.social and blacksky.community, without even having to migrate their accounts.
I want all my greens on Mastodon instead of Bluesky.
Thats the article? What? Its just a big nothing burger
I haven’t seen much arguing, it is unquestionably centralized and for profit. There truly is nothing unique about it.
I’m not an expert with the AT protocol but it really seems like what Dorsey and co have made is a super complicated protocol that (under specific conditions that cannot exist in the real world), has the potential to be federated in a meaningful way. That way they can steal all the talking points of the fediverse and muddy the meaning of words.
There are also a lot of people on Fedi who will seek out threads like these to explain how line 2532 of the AT protocol handbook explains how having 100% of users on a single server is actually decentralized but I’m sure they’re all authentic accounts.
its not hostile to suggest that the crypto bros running bluesky would openwash their true intentions
Hey, the at protocol is pretty simple really.
Essentially, the network has three main parts:
For example, bsky.app is an appview. It connects to the bolson.bsky.dev relay, and only takes objects that have an
app.bsky.*nsid/type. frontpage.fyi is another one, it connects to the relay1.us-west.bsky.network relay, it ignores all posts that except for ones withfyi.frontpage.*nsids, and that are too long.This approach is way better than activitypub.
Relays aren’t necessary, nor expensive to run (anymore). For example, appviewlite can be run easily, and can be configured to crawl PDSes itself, rather than using a relay.
The cost in running relays has also dropped. It’s roughly $34 a month. Read this article by a bluesky dev: whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3kwzl7tye6u2y.
It has the potential to be federated in a meaningful way in the real world right now.
I’m not going to deny that most people using bluesky’s servers is a problem, because it is.
Jack Dorsey wasn’t very involved in bluesky, and isn’t involved at all anymore. He left the board and deleted his account after they did moderation.
Bluesky, right now, is federated in a meaningful way. Whether or not it’s decentralised only depends on your definition of the word at this point.
Also: the people who work at bluesky, right now, have very good intentions. I don’t really think any are crypto-bros. The main problem is investors trying to claw back some value after they invested in it.
Is anyone arguing at this point?
It’s not decentralized. There’s no argument.
I’ve seen people arguing. On Mastodon, weirdly enough.
It is decentralised.
Check: blacksky.community, atproto.africa, altq.net, app.wafrn.net and zeppelin.social.
Yes, as soon as 99%+ of the users aren’t on the same server. That’s the bottom line. We can argue theory all day but it doesn’t change the implications of centralization.
I’ve spent…quite a bit of time intentionally looking for alternative ATP servers and this is the first time I’ve heard of this. And I’m balls deep in this stuff. I even run my own AP server. So I’d say it’s so obscure as to be meaningless.
My guy. LOL. No. Just no. It isn’t.
I mean…yeah? It is.
And we prefer to invest our time and energy into supporting an actually decentralized protocol.
At what point was anyone arguing semantics?
Yes, please, go ahead.
99% isn’t the threshold. I’d say like 25% or less
Well 25% is very strict, pretty sure mastodon.social is more than that for the Fediverse (I do wish other instances would grow faster to catch up)
But yea anything higher than 50% is kinda missing the point, ideally they would close signups and suggest people signup on alternative instances instead
Majority share is too powerful
join-lemmy.org actually hides any instance that’s over 30% of Lemmy github.com/LemmyNet/…/instances.tsx#L451-L456
Is that what you would actually expect Bluesky to do if they were committed to decentralization?
I said “ideally”, but they probably would’ve done a lot of things differently if they were committed to decentralization
Bluesky traded good user distribution for growth.
Doesn’t LW control ~30% of the lemmyverse?
Lemmyverse != threadiverse
It controls ~30% of the threadiverse, then.
Where is that number coming from?
My head. Lemmy.world has 15,000 (roughly) monthly active users, the threadiverse has roughly 60,000 active users,
So 25%
Alternate ATP servers:
gander.socialgandersocial.ca : canadian PDS, appview in plansHonourable mention to AppViewLite which lets you easily and cheaply host an appview yourself. I can run it on my laptop easily. It doesn’t depend on relays, it can crawls PDSes directly.
Plus the many other instances here: github.com/mary-ext/atproto-scraping
Thanks!
Cmo, what so bad with
furrysky…BLUE! I mean Bluesky 😰.
I kinda wonder… Is Bluesky’s creator(s) furry? 🤔
The furry community was pushing to switch to it from other platforms almost as soon as the site started up.
can anyone recommend a good read into the actual developments happening with ATproto as of late? i've seen a lot of insisting lately that things are changing/have changed but no one's saying what exactly is or has changed
Fediverse Reports regularly talks about updates with ATProto, and I found this blog post mentioned in another blog post from WeDistribute.
The most interesting development as of late is the progress of Blacksky. It is the first major attempt at creating an independent “Bluesky Instance”–where in that it’s functionally the same as Bluesky but doesn’t rely on any of Bluesky’s infrastructure.
There is also Wafrn, which is really hard to explain. @gabboman@app.wafrn.net is in this thread somewhere and will have to explain it.
thank you!
Not really that hard to explain, unless I'm missing your point. Wafrn is a federated Tumblr-like platform that allows two-way interaction with Bluesky users (without the need for bridging).
There’s way more to Wafrn than that, and it’s extremely interesting.
You can treat Wafrn like an independent ATProto platform (like Blacksky). It has its own PDS and AppView (which uses Blacksky’s Relay), so it’s not at all dependent on Bluesky for obtaining posts (assuming those posts are also published on an independent PDS).
What’s unique is that Wafrn is actually ActivityPub-first, meaning it doesn’t have any issue interacting with Mastodon users, but doesn’t have all the same features of a normal ATProto platform. For example must have your account on Wafrn in order to use it (as opposed to blacksky.community, which lets you sign in with an existing account on another ATProto platform); you can, however, sign into bsky.app (or blacksky) with an account created on Wafrn.
bluesky is technically decentralized, but the way it does it makes self-hosting all but impossible due to storage requirements. because of that, it really isnt. its like how a lot of ai models are 'open-source' even though the training data isnt available and the ai is still effectively a black box. it isnt decentralized unless anyone can make an instance, just like how it isnt open-source unless you have access to everything that makes it work (yes, by this definition chromium and android aren't truly open-source, and I stand by that).
this is literally the exact same for the fediverse. it is near impossible to own your data. if you want to own your data, you have to own others' data, and you're practically isolated in a black box unless you spam hashtags and spam follow people.
big instances still have a massive control over the entirety of the fediverse for whatever category (e.g. micro-blogging) they are in
but I could still easily make my own instance and be outside of that influence.
app.wafrn.net. Alt-atproto server, outside of bluesky’s control.
The storage requirements aren’t an issue anymore.
You can self host everything for around ~$34 a month.
@gabboman@app.wafrn.net runs an alternate bluesky instance (kinda) and he’s not bankrupt yet. Hell, it was on a free oracle server for a while.
There is no argument. It’s centralised.
Explain blacksky and wafrn
Don't waste your time on a feddit.uk user.
what is your instance
Their instance is app.wafrn.net ;)
Jokes aside, wafrn is a cool tumblr-like fediverse service. It has bluesky support, so it acts as another instance of bluesky.
Classic whattaboutism from you bluesky employees:
arewedecentralizedyet.online
Please continue to deflect and avoid the topic
is matrix decentralized?
lol exactly how many whataboutisms do you have to do to earn your btc?
… what?
you're a paid actor paid by jack dorsey to promote bluesky. that's obviously the best explanation to why you're invested in this
CC: @Kirk@startrek.website
why else would someone behave in such a shameful and embarassing manner
.
More importantly it’s for-profit capitalist crap? With ethical and moral considerations, there is no reason to push this when there are alternatives with much better starting blocks.
It’s a benefit corporation which means the board has to consider the benefit to society, employees, etc.
Centralization on its own is not a deal breaker. Wikipedia is centralized.
Corporate/business ownership on it’s own is not a deal breaker. There are many business mastodon instances: mastodonservers.net/servers/business
It’s the combination that is a deal breaker. Corporate AND centralized. We’ve seen this movie before. It’s a predictably boring story that ends with enshittification.
Agreeish? (M)any one of us can download wikipedia. Does that still make it centralized when it is designed to be distributed that easily? That design choice is baked into the ethos. Centralized vs. Decentralized seems not to be binary.
But once you download It, any changes you make are only local. You cannot edit wikipedia using a non-wikipedia account (sure you can edit anonymously but then your IP functions as your account) and the articles are not systematically stored in different wikipedia instances. There is one Wikipedia.
By the way, centralized doesn’t mean “walled off”.
Once you download wikipedia, you can edit it and distribute. Other people with their own copies can merge your changes into theirs, or you can push your changes upstream. Even if they need to be signed to accepted. Doesn’t that make Wikipedia more like the Linux Kernel and less like The Encyclopedia Britannica? Sure, for the kernel there is a “main and central” repo, but the whole point of git is that it isn’t centralized. It’s distributed.
In fact, in a loose way, wikipedia meets the criteria of Free Software. You can:
edit: wikipedia is predominately licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA) and the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL)
Sure but I don’t think that makes it “decentralized” it makes it as you correctly point out, open source. Those are orthogonal categories.There aren’t parts of wikipedia that are hosted in other wikipedia instances that talk to each other the same way mastodon does. There is a unique, central, Wikipedia.
You can download all of bluesky easily through the firehose, and it is federated.
I agree with your overall point, but Wikipedia has a singular mission. Social settings can have wildy different missions from shitposting, to hobbies, study groups, to support groups, etc. There is no singular moderation ethos that can apply to all of them, that’s why decentralization is important in social media.
We want to algorithms to work for the people, not have people slaving for the algorithms.
Of course I agree that decentralization for social media is hugely important. I’m just pointing out that there can exist use cases where centralization makes sense and/or is not a problem.
Absolutely I was not trying to take away from your point! Cory Doctorow actually recently wrote a good piece on Wikipedia that you reminded me of.
Luckily, there’s non-corporate bluesky servers that I can use instead of the main one.
No.
The distinction is important, and every useful idiot pivoting from one corporate platform to another should be educated on their mistake.
Who cares. It’s inherently a shit platform like Twitter. No one cares about your pithy half sentences.