Large parts of Bluesky were unavailable on Friday night. On alternative short message services, some have taken the opportunity to criticize the strong centralization of the supposedly decentralized network. Bluesky itself has since announced that a probable cause has been found and an update is being installed to fix the problem.
The CTO of the short messaging service has promised further information on the outage, which lasted around an hour. At the same time, however, Paul Frazee pointed out that the social network was not completely offline: those who host their own accounts were not affected by the outage – but may have had a fairly empty timeline.
Bluesky is based on technology that was once intended to be developed for Twitter. However, all connections have now been cut and the service is one of the most interesting alternatives to the service that has long been called X under Elon Musk. Since Donald Trump’s election victory in November, Bluesky has grown significantly, but at the same time criticism has never stopped. While those responsible repeatedly claim that the service is open, transparent and decentralized, things look different in practice. Almost all of the now over 35 million accounts are stored on Bluesky’s servers. This is not decentralized.
However, the outage last night has now made it clear that something has changed in this respect and it may accelerate the first tentative steps towards decentralization. At least as part of an early access program, interested parties can host their accounts and data on their own personal data server (PDS). Although there are restrictions – such as the limit of ten accounts per PDS –, one advantage became clear during the night’s downtime. Users who host their accounts themselves were not affected by the outage. However, as long as almost the entire user base cannot access the network in such a case, the advantage remains manageable.
Mit Ihrer Zustimmung wird hier ein externer Inhalt geladen.
Externen Inhalt jetzt laden
Some comments on Mastodon were particularly malicious. Unlike Bluesky, the short message service in the Fediverse has long been practically decentralized. The more than 8 million Mastodon accounts are located on more than 9500 servers. This means that if one or more go down, thousands still remain online. About a year ago, however, an analysis also revealed that most instances –, i.e. servers with accounts –, are hosted by the French provider OVH and that more than half of all accounts are hosted on a server of the German competitor Hetzner. This is probably also due to mastodon.social. The largest instance by far, operated by the developers, hosts almost half of all active Mastodon accounts.
(mho)
Don’t miss any news – follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn or Mastodon.
This article was originally published in German. It was translated with technical assistance and editorially reviewed before publication.
