Blog post by Christine Lemmer-Webber, co-editor of ActivityPub: https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
The likely answer to this is that there will always have to be a large corporation at the heart of Bluesky/ATProto, and the network will have to rely on that corporation to do the work of abuse mitigation, particularly in terms of illegal content and spam. This may be a good enough solution for Bluesky’s purposes, but on the economics alone it’s going to be a centralized system that relies on trusting centralized authorities.
Bingo, people don’t join Lemmy because it’s a pain in the ass to figure out how it works and if you’re unlucky your experience is shit because you joined an instance that isn’t federated with some of the major ones.
I’ve been saying it for a while now, make the decentralization happen in the background and make the front-end appear like any other website and then you’ve got an alternative that makes sense.
So like https://clubsall.com/, who fetches content from all of Lemmy without federating back?
Interesting
I was thinking a bit like regular websites. Let’s say for Reddit, the hosting might be spread over a hundred servers owned by AWS with redundancy in case one crashed, but it could be a hundred servers owned by a hundred person instead (decentralize the back-end). You need an API to let people develop a front-end allowing users to interact with those servers, but the same credentials could be used on any of those front-ends and users wouldn’t have an account associated with a specific server (just like you don’t choose what server you’re signing up on when joining Reddit).
So yeah, decentralized dumb back-end, decentralized smart front-end, making the experience as user friendly as any centralized website and still removing admins from the equation.
So actor portability?
Possibly, I’m not super knowledgeable on the technical side, it’s just ideas I’ve had since joining Lemmy and seeing the flaws with it.