It’s arguably much easier to solve the UX issues when you are designing a centralized service, which is what Bluesky is.

It is easier, but it's still possible to solve the UX issues with a decentralized service, in my opinion. What I think is the main issue is that these decentralized services are made by programmers with little regard or intuition for UX, and there is also a lack of funding to work on UX problems.

I agree the UX challenge is much more challenging for decentralised services. I don't know enough about Bluesky to really comment on whether it is centralised or not.

Regardless, I think there's another thing that helped Bluesky: VC capital. In particular, to hire people to work on UX. It's a bit of a pet-peeve of mine, but I find it strange that designer don't contribute more to projects like Mastodon, which definitely need it. Even from the selfish angle of building a portfolio, helping solve Mastodon's UX challenges is much more impressive and realistic, than doing the millionth redesign of Gmail that will never get implemented.

It's a "distributed protocol" but there's really only a single server using it.

People are running every element of the Bluesky / AtProtocol stack independently. Bluesky could disappear and it would continue to function as is (albeit with lots of Bluesky data lost).

PDS's to hold users data, relays/firehoses to aggregate & forward traffic, AppViews to create composite views of likes, replies, etc, resolvers to lookup DIDs, clients to access the network. Each of these has independent implementations. BlueSky is already decentralized & already has viable credible exit. It's not decentralized, and indeed the scalability & accessibility of having firehose consumers has the greatest scale out decentralization characteristics we've seen anywhere short of BitTorrent.

I don't know why you're being downvoted. I tried it the other day and this is indeed how it works. I could even see my home traffic rise and fall over the course of the day in time with activity on the network.

It seems quite reliable that Bluesky gets down voted. Whether it's mastodon/Fediverse folk or right wing pro twitter philes or both, I dunno, but it sucks to have aggressors out there, dark forest freaks sniping away.

I try very hard to find the positive & to upvote things I don't fully agree with, if well argued. I wish the social network of HN could do more against adversarial zero-sim thinking, didn't have people who insist on draining.

Arguable indeed: plenty of email clients have great UI. Both RSS readers I used are better than Facebook.

> This is, at least in part, a UX problem.

Right, but that's the entire point: Mastodon's UX problems are caused by its decentralization and mostly cannot be separated from it. Arguably all the problems of decentralization that make users disprefer it are UX problems-- that doesn't mean they are easy to solve.

People keep thinking decentralization fails for technical reasons, when it’s economic. Without an economic model nobody can afford the massive effort required to make software polished and usable.

As a general rule I’d say polished user friendly software takes 10X the effort at a minimum vs software only nerds can use. That’s probably an underestimation. For consumer software it’s probably 100X. It’s because computers are incredibly confusing and hard to use and it takes immense effort to overcome that.

(If you don’t agree that computers are confusing and hard to use, you are part of a tiny highly educated minority.)

I’ve said this around here like a hundred times because it feels like I am the only one who gets it.

The tech to create an excellent decentralized network with an excellent experience and without the weaknesses of Mastodon exists. It doesn’t get used because nobody pays for it. Centralization gives you an economic model from either directly charging for access or selling data or ads, and none of that works in a decentralized world.