On Thursday evening, the decentralized social network Bluesky experienced a significant outage, leaving users unable to load the app on both the web and mobile devices for roughly an hour. According to a message on Bluesky's status page, the company was aware of the outage, which it attributed to 'Major PDS Networking Problems.' (PDS means personal data servers.) The question many may be asking now is, how did this decentralized social network go down' Isn't it ' decentralized' Isn't one of the perks of decentralization that there's not a single point of failure' Despite the platform's decentralized nature, the majority of Bluesky users today interact with the service via Bluesky's official app, powered by the AT Protocol. While in theory, anyone can run the various parts of the infrastructure that make up the protocol, including PDS, relays, and other components, it's still early days for the social network, so few have done so. In time, the idea is that many communities will be...
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