We see that decentralized social networks could also go down.
On Thursday evening, Bluesky, a decentralized social network, experienced a major outage, with users unable to load the app on both web and mobile devices for about an hour. According to a message about the Bluesky status page, the company was aware of the outage caused by “major PDS networking issues.” (PDS means personal data server.)
The first status message was posted at 6:55pm ET, and the second message indicating that the amendment was applied was shared at 7:38pm ET.
A question that many may be asking now is how has this decentralized social network gone down? Is it… decentralized? Isn’t this one of the perks of decentralization that doesn’t have a single point of failure?
Despite the decentralized nature of the platform, the majority of Bluesky users today interact with services powered by the AT protocol via Bluesky’s official app. In theory, anyone can implement various parts of the infrastructure that make up a protocol that includes PD, relays and other components, but it’s still too early for social networks.
However, those who did it were not affected by the suspension.
Eventually, many communities are built on BlueSky, with some having their own infrastructure, moderation services and even client applications. (One example is the work the Blacksky team is doing to create a safer and more welcoming online space that utilizes these distributed tools.)
Ultimately, Bluesky hopes to become one of many entities that run the infrastructure needed to support the growing number of applications built on the AT protocol.
However, at a near stage, the outage affecting Bluesky’s infrastructure feels even more widespread.
The outage has stirred up some of the competition between Bluesky and another distributed social network, Mastodon. This is done in another social networking protocol called ActivityPub. Mastodon users quickly pointed out the halt to create jokes and jabs that focus on Bluesky’s approach to decentralization.
One Mastodon user Luke Johnson wrote, “Look at how mighty blueski fall apart while the raspberry PIs running mastodon under my bed are devouring.”
Or, when another Mastodon user joked, “A lovely decentralization has arrived there.”
In any case, the Bluesky stop is resolved shortly after it started, and the service is stopped and running.
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