Twitter’s decentralized offshoot Bluesky now has 2 million users

Lee Duna@lemmy.nz to Technology@beehaw.org – 67 points –
Twitter’s decentralized offshoot Bluesky now has 2 million users
theverge.com
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That just sounds like standard scaling. No big Plattform is running on one server with one instance

@notepass No. In difference to regular scaling you can see the host of your account. These are separate systems that communicate via Bluesky's protocol and not via the regular scaling mechanisms.

can users in other instances talk with people in bluesky?

No because it’s not decentralized. That’s like saying Twitter is decentralized because it’s microservices communicate over https.

That's what I wanted to ask. Last time I heard about their federation, their team were claiming the tests are underway in a sandbox or something. I wonder how that's going.

@loki @dawnerd Well, since the accounts are now moved to their specific hosts, you can use these hostnames instead of the generic one when using their protocol. The only action where you currently still need the generic bluesky host name (bsky.app) is during some account related activities.

The different hosts already talk to each other using the same protocol that is already in use for third parties who interact with bluesky (like alternate clients or custom feeds). The only thing that currently prevents "real" decentralization is the user registry.

From the outside it appears as if it all was some monolithic block. But this is only the case since the default usernames are using the bsky.social hostname. But in fact you can already use your own hostnames for your account, since the account is not locked to any hostname but to some unique hash. (Which is one of the advantages of their protocol and which we really should implement in the Fediverse as well to perform real account portability)

@loki What do you mean exactly with "other instances" in this context?