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Can we please stop arguing about whether Bluesky is decentralized?
(privacy.thenexus.today)
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this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2025
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Centralization on its own is not a deal breaker. Wikipedia is centralized.
Corporate/business ownership on it's own is not a deal breaker. There are many business mastodon instances: https://mastodonservers.net/servers/business
It's the combination that is a deal breaker. Corporate AND centralized. We've seen this movie before. It's a predictably boring story that ends with enshittification.
Agreeish? (M)any one of us can download wikipedia. Does that still make it centralized when it is designed to be distributed that easily? That design choice is baked into the ethos. Centralized vs. Decentralized seems not to be binary.
But once you download It, any changes you make are only local. You cannot edit wikipedia using a non-wikipedia account (sure you can edit anonymously but then your IP functions as your account) and the articles are not systematically stored in different wikipedia instances. There is one Wikipedia.
By the way, centralized doesn't mean "walled off".
Once you download wikipedia, you can edit it and distribute. Other people with their own copies can merge your changes into theirs, or you can push your changes upstream. Even if they need to be signed to accepted. Doesn't that make Wikipedia more like the Linux Kernel and less like The Encyclopedia Britannica? Sure, for the kernel there is a "main and central" repo, but the whole point of git is that it isn't centralized. It's distributed.
In fact, in a loose way, wikipedia meets the criteria of Free Software. You can:
edit: wikipedia is predominately licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA) and the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL)
Sure but I don't think that makes it "decentralized" it makes it as you correctly point out, open source. Those are orthogonal categories.There aren't parts of wikipedia that are hosted in other wikipedia instances that talk to each other the same way mastodon does. There is a unique, central, Wikipedia.
You can download all of bluesky easily through the firehose, and it is federated.
Luckily, there's non-corporate bluesky servers that I can use instead of the main one.
I agree with your overall point, but Wikipedia has a singular mission. Social settings can have wildy different missions from shitposting, to hobbies, study groups, to support groups, etc. There is no singular moderation ethos that can apply to all of them, that's why decentralization is important in social media.
We want to algorithms to work for the people, not have people slaving for the algorithms.
Of course I agree that decentralization for social media is hugely important. I'm just pointing out that there can exist use cases where centralization makes sense and/or is not a problem.
Absolutely I was not trying to take away from your point! Cory Doctorow actually recently wrote a good piece on Wikipedia that you reminded me of.