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   Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@social.coop)'s status on Tuesday, 13-May-2025 04:35:37 JST Christine Lemmer-Webber

   "Christine what do you think of people running Bluesky relays now"

   It's good. It's not decentralized, it's still a star topology (there's still one "main" relay everything consumes from) and most of these are cheap by being shallow. But it's def good for people to do it

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     Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@social.coop)'s status on Tuesday, 13-May-2025 04:43:37 JST Christine Lemmer-Webber

     in reply to

     • Linux Is Best

     @Linux Good question. It's good that other people are trying out the infrastructure, because currently in theory nobody else can run the code. However, it's not good in that it still decentralization-washes things.

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     Linux Is Best (linux@mk.absturztau.be)'s status on Tuesday, 13-May-2025 04:43:38 JST Linux Is Best

     in reply to

     @cwebber@social.coop So.... Where is the good part?
     
     I mean, if it is still all centralized, and they act as gatekeeper, I'm not sure where the good part of this is.

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     Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@social.coop)'s status on Tuesday, 13-May-2025 04:46:39 JST Christine Lemmer-Webber

     in reply to

     • Linux Is Best

     @Linux People are running code that performs part of the protocol. But it's still a problem.

     At any rate, I updated the original post to clarify. As I said even in my original post, it's still not decentralized.

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     Linux Is Best (linux@mk.absturztau.be)'s status on Tuesday, 13-May-2025 04:46:41 JST Linux Is Best

     in reply to

     @cwebber@social.coop I'm sorry, I'm still not seeing the good part. If it is centralized and, in theory, nobody else can run the code...
     
     I think I like ActivityPub and how the Fediverse works. Anyone can use it, no one can gate keep it, and it is not centralized.

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     Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@social.coop)'s status on Tuesday, 13-May-2025 06:04:59 JST Christine Lemmer-Webber

     in reply to

     • Noisytoot

     @noisytoot It's not the worst. I am not *that* worried about fediverse relays. But I am worried about them being used as a solution for archiving, if used wrong.

     More later. But it's not a big concern/threat. It's more that there's a better way I think.

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     Noisytoot (noisytoot@berkeley.edu.pl)'s status on Tuesday, 13-May-2025 06:05:05 JST Noisytoot
     @cwebber In what way are fediverse relays re-centralization? They're not really comparable to Bluesky relays in that they're completely optional and there's no single central relay, they're just for smaller instances to get more posts federated to them.
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     Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@social.coop)'s status on Wednesday, 14-May-2025 16:49:31 JST Christine Lemmer-Webber

     in reply to

     I was wrong in my post, apparently the new relay demos are connecting directly to PDS'es. Not necessarily the whole network, though they could with this few of them.

     If they *did* connect to the whole network, I think this would lead to the quadratic scaling issue I outlined in my previous blogposts. But anyway.

     It's a star topology in practice insofar as people are not largely relying on this, but it seems I was wrong to say that the new relays are a star topology. Mea culpa.