Bluesky and the AT Protocol: Usable Decentralized Social Media

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

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 a different flavor of decentralization on the technical level compared to, say, the fediverse.

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

> 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 user can then publish such a feed under their account, and other users can consume it. This is essentially event sourcing. Here’s a technical paper with details: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.03239.pdf We’ll have more to share on composable moderation in near future.