It turns out that decentralized social networks can also be reduced.
On Thursday night, the Decentralized Social Network Bluesky has shown a significant interruption, letting users not be able to load the application on both the tissue and mobile devices for about an hour. According to a message on the Bluesky Status page, the company was aware of the interruption, which migraged to “big PDS networking problems”. (PDS means personal data servers.)
The first status message was published at 6:55 pm Et, and a second that shows that a repair was implemented shortly after 7:38 pm Et.
The question that many can ask now is, how has this decentralized social network decreased? Isn’t it … decentralized? Isn’t one of the privileges of decentralization that there is not a single point of failure?
Despite the decentralized nature of the platform, the majority of Bluesky users are currently interacting with the service through the official application of Bluesky, powered by the AT protocol. While theoretically, anyone can run the various parts of infrastructure composing the protocol, Including PDS, relays and other elements, it’s still the first days for the social network, so few have done so.
Those who did, however, were not affected by the interruption.
Over time, the idea is that many communities will be built on Bluesky, some with their own infrastructure, moderation services and even customer applications. (An example is the work that Black The team is doing to create safer, more hospitable online spaces that benefit from these decentralized tools.)
In the end, the hope is that Bluesky will be one of the many entities that perform the infrastructure needed to support the increasing number of applications based on the AT protocol.
In the short term, however, a interruption that affects the infrastructure of Bluesky will be felt more widely.
The interruption recovers some of the rivalry between Bluesky and another decentralized social network, Mastodon, which runs on a different social networking protocol called ActivityPub. Mastodon users rushed to point out the interruption to make jokes or piercings focused on the Bluesky approach for decentralization.
A Mastodon, Luke Johnson user, I wrote“See how Mighty Bluesky collapses, while Raspberry Pi runs Mastodon under my bed just holds the chugging together” – a reference to how Mastodon can run away and even small machinery themselves regulate themselves.
Or, as another Mastodon user joke“Nice decentralization you got there.”
In any case, the Bluesky interruption was resolved shortly after the start and the service is back and running.
