Yes, this does help, but atproto as a whole still doesn't scale well:
In the beginning of our network, we have 26 users, which conveniently for us map to each letter of the English alphabet: [Alice, Bob, Carol, ... Zack]. Each user sends one message per day, which is intended to have one recipient. (This may sound unrealistic, but this is fine to do to model our scenario.) To simplify things, we'll have each user send a message in a ring: Alice sends a message to Bob, Bob sends a message to Carol, and so on, all the way up to Zack, who simply we wrap around and have message Alice. This could be because these messages have specific intended recipients or it could be because Bob is the sole "follower" of Alice's posts, Carol is the sole "follower" of Bob's, etc.
Let's look at what happens in a single day under both systems.
Under message passing, Alice sends her message to Bob. Only Bob need receive the message. So on and so forth.
From an individual self-hosted server, only one message is passed per day: 1.
From the fully decentralized network, the total number of messages passed, zooming out, is the number of participants in the network: 26.
Under the public-gods-eye-view-shared-heap model, each user must know of all messages to know what may be relevant. Each user must receive all messages.
From an individual self-hosted server, 26 messages must be received.
Zooming out, the number of messages which must be transmitted in the day is 26 * 26: 676, since each user receives each message.
Okay, so what does that mean? How bad is this? With 26 users, this doesn't sound like so much. Now let's add 5 users.
Under message passing:
Per server, still 1 message received per user per day.
Per the network, it's 5 extra messages transmitted per day, which makes sense: we've added 5 users.
Under the public-gods-eye-view-shared-heap model:
Per server: 5 new messages received per user per day.
Per the network, it's ((31 * 31) - (26 * 26)): 285 new messages per day!
But we aren't actually running networks of 26 users. We are running networks of millions of users. What would happen if we had a million self-hosted users and five new users were added to the network? Zooming out, once again, the message passing system simply has five new messages sent. Under the public shared heap model, it is 10,000,025 new messages sent! For adding five new self-hosted users! (And that's even just with our simplified model of only sending one message per day per user!)
Actually, take a look at AppViewLite, it lets you skip relays and crawl PDSes directly. Its fairly lightweight as well, so you could host it alongside a PDS.
Define decentralised.As per RFC 9518: Centralization, Decentralization, and Internet Standards,
[...] "centralization" is the state of affairs where a single entity or a small group of them can observe, capture, control, or extract rent from the operation or use of an Internet function exclusively.
[Decentralization is when] "complete reliance upon a single point is not always required" (citing Baran, 1964)
[...] federation, i.e., designing a function in a way that uses independent instances that maintain connectivity and interoperability to provide a single cohesive service.
Ah, right.Well, this is just AP in general.Though, piefed having community moving is great, since communities aren't trapped on their host server.
I don't think lemmy.world would be as big a problem if they could move communities there.
I know, but that wasn't my point. Getting cut off by a large server is a problem in any network.Yes, its bad that bluesky controls most of atproto, but its possible to use atproto without bluesky.
You're misinterpreting my comment, I said that getting cut off a large server is a problem in any network. The problem is worse on bluesky, but that can change.If I run a PDS, I connect to bluesky and other instances as well. I can get cut off bluesky's server, but there is other servers.
I'm not rationalising anything, I just think the discourse around bluesky is toxic, and I want to at least make it less annoying.I don't even like bluesky, I do like the underlying protocol though.
I agree with you there.I wish they put a bit more effort into getting people onto independant servers.They took to opposite approch of mastodon: they abandoned proper distribution for better growth.
In any case, ActivityPub and atproto can both coexist.
My point was that the network was fairly centralised in the beginning. The people behind atproto.africa are working on an alternate bluesky appview anyway.
I have read it, and a lot of the problems have been addressed.Bluesky is still very early. There was an awkward period where lemmy was mostly lemmy.ml.
I'm not trying to cherry pick anything, I'm just addressing arguments against it I have seen.
Because all the nerds who want to do that are on mastodon ; ).
Jokes aside, people are self hosting them, there's about 2000 independant PDSes right now.