yes, see this thread
https://social.wildeboer.net/@jwildeboer/113487613965056474
“#BlueSky isn’t decentralised or federated. The outage yesterday is the obvious proof. It may look decentralised and they definitely love to outsource traffic and storage costs by claiming that running your own PDS (Personal Data Server) is somehow something federated, but that’s all smoke and mirrors. You have to go deep on [1] to find “networking through Relays instead of server-to-server” as their current implementation choice. THEY run the relays. No one else.”
You can run your own relay, though:
https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/entries/Notes on Running a Full-Network atproto Relay (July 2024)
I do prefer Activitypub overall, and it’s certainly more mature, but any efforts towards decentralization should be encouraged/celebrated.
You can run your own relay, in that sense the “body” of bluesky is when considered in the abstract potentially decentralized… but when you consider the “brain” of bluesky nodes and the layer of moderation and post/commenting is still locked into a centralized system it is a bit like arguing borg drones have free will because they are physically individual beings.
Or it is like arguing an ant isn’t existentially dependent upon the structure of the ant colony to survive since each ant posesses an individual body with its own six legs.
