one of the clearest gaps in the ecosystem - working against the lofty decentralisation goals - is how power concentrates in tools: lists/feeds/labellers the implicit decision by bsky rn is "don't let these things become powerful", which also means "don't let these things become *too* useful"
Baldemoto🇵🇸
Moderating @furryli.st always made me feel that something was missing from atproto. If we disappeared, so too would the community we built This feeling’s finally crystallized into this proposal: Composable Trust We created identities that survive platform failure. Lets do the same for communities!
Mar 6, 2026 at 11:28 PM
Re: Re: Bluesky and Decentralization -- Dustycloud Brainstorms
A few weeks ago I wrote How decentralized is Bluesky really?, a blogpost which received far more attention than I expected on the fediverse and Bluesky both. Thankfully, the blogpost was received well generally, including by Bluesky's team. Bryan Newbold, core Bluesky engineer, wrote a thoughtful response article: Reply on Bluesky and Decentralization, which I consider worth reading.
On discourse and decentralisation
Over the last year, as Bluesky got more popular, conversations about whether Bluesky and ATProto are really ‘decentralised’ have gotten more “popular” as well. These conversations ranged from high-quality, productive back-and-forth articles to people just saying a lot of dumb stuff on the internet (shocker, I know). As time went on, this discourse has grown […]
The ecosystem is moving
Considerations for distributed and decentralized technologies from the perspective of a product that many would like to see decentralize....
How newsrooms, scientific institutions & governments can best use Bluesky
Large organisations need dedicated tools and processes to manage their Bluesky presence and get the most out of ATproto.
Power: A Primer for Perplexed Economists
Let's Assume an Unfettered Marketplace of Ideas! Or Actually, Let's Not.
Ecosystem Plugins - Wesley's notes
Bridging the interop gap and addressing the long-tail of user needs
'Composable Moderation' May Protect Bluesky from Political Pressure | TechPolicy.Press
Shifting enforcement away from a single platform and into a distributed ecosystem should blunt interference by authoritarians, writes Audrey Hingle.
Infrastructure for Interdependence: Building technology in service of collective power - The Algo Rhythm by Blacksky
[This document serves as a memo for investors]
Is Bluesky's "Decentralization" Real? – The Empty Promise of DIDs and the Path to a WordPress-Style Ecosystem - Nightflight
How Infrastructure Works: Transforming our shared systems for a changing world
'Pulsing with wisdom and humanity... a masterpiece' ED YONG'A hopeful, lyrical - even beautiful - hymn to the systems of mutual aid we embed in our material world' CORY DOCTOROW'An extraordinary book' MARK MIODOWNIK'You won't see the world the same after reading this book!' AUSTIN KLEONEvery day, we are granted the power to travel at high speeds, fly, see in the dark, summon water from distant mountains and electricity from the sun. The systems that run our world are invisible to us until they fail.Infrastructure enables lives of astounding ease and freedom that would have been unimaginable just a century ago. These technological systems - the most complex and vast ever created by humans - have allowed us to work collectively for the public good. But these systems are now beginning to fail us.Engineering professor Deb Chachra takes readers on a fascinating tour of these essential utilities, revealing how they work, what it takes to keep them running, and just how much they shape our lives - but also the price they extract, who pays it and in what ways, as well as the threats to our infrastructure in a changing world.From Snowdonia's Electric Mountain to a solar plant in southern India, Chachra shows how we can rebuild our shared infrastructure to be not just functional but also equitable, resilient, and sustainable. We need to learn how to see these systems and to transform them, together, because the cost of not being able to rely on them is unthinkably high.
How decentralized is Bluesky really? -- Dustycloud Brainstorms
Recently due to various events (namely a lot of people getting off of X-Twitter), Bluesky has become a lot more popular, and excitement for its underlying protocol, ATProto, is growing. Since I worked on ActivityPub which connects together Mastodon, Sharkey, Peertube, GotoSocial, etc, etc, etc in the present-day fediverse, I often get asked whether or not I have opinions about ATProto vs ActivityPub, and the answer is that I do have opinions, but I am usually head-down focused on building what I hope to be the next generation of decentralized (social) networking tech, and so I keep to myself about such things except in private channels.
The Bluesky ecosystem has the juice (ATProto for normies) - Nate Spilman
An explanation for people who don't care about software protocols Bluesky is built on top of a new software protocol - https://atproto.com/ - for building distr...
The Bluesky ecosystem has the juice (ATProto for normies) - Pioneer
An explanation for people who don't care about software protocolsBluesky is built on top of a new software protocol - https://atproto.com/ - for building dis...
Building your own algorithm on Bluesky and AT Protocol with Graze
Ecosystem Review
A review of decentralized social media ecosystems published by Twitter's "bluesky" team on the 21st January 2021
An unordered / non-exhaustive list of things that helped scale Bluesky's infra efficiently: + Exiting the cloud (colocation) + HAProxy w/many Node backends + Go w/clever code + ScyllaDB + SQLite w/per user databases + Redis w/many instances + AMD servers w/many cores + Purchasing bandwidth directly
