Nobody cares about decentralization until they do
A recurring line in discussion of federated, decentralized social media is that no one cares about it. They just want their Twitter without the Nazis.
Which is okay. But how it looks on the backend matters. When the illusion of a unified user experience breaks, how accessible the escape pod is matters.
Consider this scenario: you try to log on to your favorite social media one day and the server you were on is just gone.
Mastodon and the broader ActivityPub (AP) network offer little hope here. Everything lived on that server. There was a popular server in the little subculture I inhabit that was ganged up on by some shitposting instances until the mods quit and it shut down. I can't convince anyone in that subculture to try Mastodon whether for the first time or again. They've all heard about what happened. They know there's a different group of servers that picks random instances to attack similarly.
And every single one, with few exceptions, that tried Bluesky prefers it.
There are sparks of discussion of solutions in the spaces of Mastodon and ActivityPub, but the damage is done. If Bluesky can't get word out that Jack Dorsey ragequit, then Mastodon/AP has little hope of reaching the millions who've already chosen their alignment toward it.
The response to the thing will always lose a race with the thing.
Bluesky and AT protocol (AT) are different. The planned recovery scenario has a little box in your app that says your PDS went away and offers to move your account. How it does that doesn't matter to the user (probably), but it can do it: the keys live in the app, the data is sitting there safely on a relay, or in the app itself. Most likely, the user never encounters this since they start and stay on a Bluesky PDS. But the option is there. The real process is still technical and under development, but that's the goal.
Something like the network-gutting mass defederations Mastodon is known for can happen, but the impetus behind that isn't really there. Your data is either on the official Bluesky relay or one of the relays that eventually pop up for subcultures that often experience moderator action for ideological or commercial reasons. There will be a relay for furries, a relay for sex workers, a relay for climate scientists, a relay for reactionary assholes. You get the idea. It might not be total recovery: a platform could decide not to connect to a particular relay, but that's less likely when they don't actually have to host anything.
Relays start out much more expensive to run than Mastodon's instances, but early experiments suggest the upper bound will be much more accessible to the communities they'll ultimately serve, while self-hosting an AT protocol PDS should never be as difficult or expensive as self-hosting a Mastodon instance.
See the latter reflected in the pricing of Masto.host, one of the leading managed Mastodon hosting services. "Federation capacity" is key here. These factors affect it:
- Number of servers you federate with
- The number of people you follow
- The number of people who follow you
The server process that handles the queue for all the communication between servers quickly gets overwhelmed if you don't have server resources to match. In contrast, AT protocol platforms like Bluesky and Whitewind primarily hit the relay. Your self-hosting cost is a reflection of how many relays subscribe to it, and that will probably never get too large to handle on a budget. Mastodon has a "relay" concept, but it's primarily focused on helping small servers build those resource-demanding connections that, in the AP world, are needed for a vibrant experience outside the local timeline. Since relays have it all, and platforms subscribe to relays, you should never run into a post where you can't see most of the replies unless you go out of your way to read posts from PDSes directly. Which defeats the purpose.
Where Mastodon puts instances out front, making the user's handle a thing under the instance domain, Bluesky/AT prioritizes unique user handles. My handle didn't change when they launched federation and migrated me to a PDS. My handle is the same whether the AppView you view it through is a blogging platform or a social media app or an event organizing tool. They're all stored on the same PDS and crawled by any relays that subscribe to it. I'm always @kyefox.com whether it's https://whtwnd.com/kyefox.com or https://bsky.app/profile/kyefox.com.
The platform, then, is just a viewer for what's on your PDS by way of a relay. Or, in AT protocol parlance, an AppView.
So it's true: most people don't care about decentralization now. When they do, more will be happy with the recovery paths available if they choose a platform on the AT protocol.
I won't claim it's perfect, but you don't have to lose everything the way you would on platforms with limited or no recovery options. I do expect forks of Bluesky to appear to connect to relays that serve specific communities. It won't be a 100% connected federation, but as we've seen with Mastodon and AP, that was never going to happen as long as we don't all run our own copy of the entire stack and connect in a way that's impossible to filter. That's a harder problem than all the hard problems Bluesky is trying to solve.