Article by Mike Masnick
Last week, Bluesky, where I am on the board (so feel free to consider this as biased as can be), announced that it had raised a $15 million seed round, and with it announced some plans for building out subscription plans and helping to make the site sustainable (some of which may be very cool — stay tuned). A few days prior to that happening, Bluesky hit 13 million users and continues to grow. It’s still relatively small, but it has now done way more with a smaller team and less money than Twitter did at a similar point in its evolution.
I’m excited with where things are trending with Bluesky for a few reasons, but I wanted to actually talk about something else. Just before I joined the board, I had met up with a group of supporters of “decentralized social media,” who more leaned towards ActivityPub/Mastodon/Threads over Bluesky. Even though I wasn’t officially representing Bluesky, they knew I was a fan of Bluesky and asked me how I viewed the overall decentralized social media landscape.
Basically bluesky works with pds’s, that host account data, (i actually host my own), appviews, which manage the post sorting/algorithm and ui, and relays, that sit between the two and make it easier (theyre not strictly necessary, but make At-proto services much faster and more reliable).
Relays are expensive, and so bluesky’s relay is the only real one currently, not because theyre shutting other people out, because a relay is expensive. So currently you kind of have to use bluesky’s servers to use the AT protocol, but thatll change whenever someone has the resources to setup a good relay.