There's basically only one instance.

There's only one PLC directory.

There's very few full relays (edit: appviews), none that I'm aware of that don't mirror bluesky censorship/moderation decisions.

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danabramov an hour ago | parent | next [-]

- There's no "instances" so I don't know what you mean by this.

- Re: PLC directory, indeed, there is only one of those. I think this is a legit point but it's worth considering the whole point of PLC directory is to be the single minimal stateless open source part that lifts identities out of apps and hostings. PLC governance and maintenance is being spun out into a Swiss organization (https://atproto.com/blog/plc-directory-org). Longer term the idea is for it to have a similar role to ICANN. Here's more on that: https://youtu.be/9z0z-Qu66yM?si=_8Dcw1M3VSKFGZhm&t=493

- Re: full Relays, they're easy/cheap to run, and you can run one yourself if you think the other ones are coordinating with Bluesky and don't trust their decisions. You don't need to depend on something else to do that.

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JoshTriplett an hour ago | parent [-]

> PLC governance and maintenance is being spun out into a Swiss organization (https://atproto.com/blog/plc-directory-org). Longer term the idea is for it to have a similar role to ICANN.

And since that sounds like a massive centralization problem, how do we have a dozen more of them with independent governance that aren't all controlled by either the same legal entity or by whoever has legal leverage to compel that entity?

	▲	danabramov 38 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Well, I think you also need to consider what PLC is. It’s an open source implementation of an open source spec. The implementation holds zero private state and exposes a verifiable log of operations for audit. There’s ongoing work on mirrors and replicas. Also, its output itself is cryptographically self-verifying. I get that it’s not ideal but I think it’s worth keeping in mind that there’s not much you can mess up with it other than refusing to update requests. The threat model is very limited and it would immediately be obvious that this is happening, killing the credibility.

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iameli 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There are many relays, here's a list of 13 but it's not comprehensive: https://tangled.org/firehose.club/community-firehose-list/bl...

Bluesky's moderation actions are generally implemented as moderation labels which take effect at the AppView level. Sometimes they'll take down someone's PDS or censor from their relays, but I don't believe third-party relays are aware of those relay takedowns at all.

	▲	RobotToaster an hour ago \| parent [-]
		You're right, I was probably confusing appviews with relays.

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tao_oat an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Most decentralized systems I can think of tend to follow a power law distribution (roughly) where one or a few platforms dominate. In the fediverse that's mastodon.social (or maybe Threads), in email that's Gmail, in AP that's Bluesky. I'm not sure this is unique to the AT protocol?

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BadBadJellyBean 40 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I think the centralization on mastodon.social is a bit over estimated. According to fedidb.com there are over 1.1M active users in the fediverse. Of these mastodon.social has about 273k. That means mastodon.social has about 1/4 of the active users. The rest are scattered over nearly 43k servers. So I'd say the fediverse is pretty decentralized. That would make it pretty resilient.

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dokyun 29 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

On fedi there are several distinct pockets apart from the mastodon crowd which although don't dominate in raw headcount have their own flavour and unique view of the network (in 2nd place is "dark fedi", which has more shitposters, hackers and free speech adjacents; there's also a contingent of Japanese users mostly on Misskey instances). What I get out of AT is that this wouldn't really happen, since the content distribution would dominate your view with Bluesky posts regardless of your relationship with the rest of the network.

	▲	tao_oat 18 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		In AT you also get communities, in the same way that twitter had weird twitter, black twitter, and so on. But because you, by design, don't really see what PDS people use, it's more fluid. I personally think that this actually leads to healthier communities but that may be a matter of taste!

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runako an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

re: censorship & moderation, the folks @ BlackSky have been active in building out an alternative moderation structure (alongside running PDSes & AppViews).