There has been a lot discussion about whether Bluesky is truly capable of being decentralized or not, especially considering the costs of replicating some of the centralized services that Bluesky offers. That is a valid question that is subject to debate. Technically it can be decentralized, but so far hasn't been... for a variety of reasons.
I think that Bluesky and the Fediverse look at things very differently.
When the Fediverse looks at decentralization, they think of servers and platforms that could be run by individuals or small communities. Decentralized to the level of the individual. And the fediverse community seems to be adverse to large instances, as seen by many complaints that certain Mastodon instances are becoming too large.
But Bluesky is looking at the organization level. In other words, could another large organization create another competing Twitter on the AT Protocol? Or could some organization create a Facebook or TikTok equivalent on the AT Protocol? Basically the concept of having the equivalents of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok all being able to talk to one another, all run by different organizations, not individuals.
Basically, how the AT Protocol becomes decentralized is when some organization creates a TikTok equivalent that uses AT Protocol, as an example, and they create their own AT Protocol stack to support it. One billionaire recently offered money to anyone who would build one.
So we are talking about different levels of decentralization here: the organizational level or the individual level.
I don't think these camps will ever agree on what decentralization means since they look at things very differently. Luckily these protocols can be bridged, and some platforms are multi-protocol, which would allow people to choose the level of decentralization they want.
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