How Decentralized Is Bluesky Really? https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
A technical deep-dive, since people have been asking me for my thoughts. I'll expand a bit on some of the key points here in a thread.
@cwebber I've read your entire article, thanks so much for such a detailed & thoughtful writeup. It was very illuminating as I had not come across any discourse yet that really got into the weeds about DID implementations and so forth. I was also not aware of your proposals regarding Ocap. This is interesting stuff I want to try to understand further. I am glad that you are thinking about these pain points with current fedi implementation, we're all feeling them and I hope they can be addressed.
@cwebber I noticed some more things about bluesky flowing from their decision to centralize around a relay. One, they can and have cut the bluesky over to a non-public relay and gave themselves (temporarily) preferential performance over third party consumers: https://bsky.app/profile/bnewbold.net/post/3lbirrqme2s2w
This was only for a couple of days, but still interesting to note.
@cwebber Two, they also have the ability to, at their discretion (and hopefully temporarily) have their relay suspend consuming any federated PDS of their choosing. currently, they are not consuming any data from bridgy fed: https://github.com/snarfed/bridgy-fed/issues/1520
I don't think it requires much imagination to see why them having this level of control over what people in the network can see might be a problem...