DEVOURED
Everyone Wants Servers And Nobody Wants Servers
Recent DDoS attacks on Bluesky and Mastodon reveal that resilience in social networks depends less on protocol design and more on whether people actually run and maintain independent servers.
What: Analysis of why Bluesky went down for a full day during a DDoS attack while the fediverse stayed mostly operational, even though Bluesky's protocol is explicitly designed for decentralization and resilience while ActivityPub isn't.
Why it matters: Challenges a common assumption in open social networks that good protocol design automatically leads to resilient systems. The fediverse works today because thousands of people chose to run servers during the 2022 Twitter exodus, but almost no new servers have launched since, and even well-designed alternatives like Bonfire have no one running them. Meanwhile, different organizations are experimenting with what institutional forms could sustain the atproto ecosystem (national identity, community governance, regional sovereignty), but none have proven successful yet.
Takeaway: If you care about open social networks being resilient, consider running your own server or supporting organizations that do, rather than assuming decentralized ecosystems will naturally mature on their own.
Deep dive
- Network resilience is an emergent property of many independent services being resilient, not something protocols can guarantee by themselves
- The fediverse currently appears more resilient because tens of thousands of independently operated servers exist, so attacking one (even mastodon.social with 30% of users) doesn't take down the whole network
- ActivityPub protocol doesn't even specify servers or instances—they emerged from how Mastodon implemented the protocol about actors sending messages
- Bluesky's atproto explicitly designs for resilience through credible exit (users can leave without permission) and disintermediation (splitting identity, storage, moderation, feeds into independent swappable components)
- Despite better protocol-level design for decentralization, Bluesky went down for 99% of users while the fediverse stayed mostly up during recent DDoS attacks
- The fediverse's resilience is contingent on a specific historical moment: the 2022-2023 wave of new servers during the Twitter/Musk exodus
- Only 3 new Mastodon servers with over 1,000 monthly active users have launched in the past 36 months, and only 38 with over 100 users
- The current topology relies on admins who joined 3+ years ago, with minimal replacement happening
- Bonfire demonstrates the real bottleneck: despite having superior features (circles, granular controls, long-form blogging) and community enthusiasm, essentially no one is running multi-user Bonfire servers
- In the atproto ecosystem, different organizations are testing different institutional models: Gander (Canadian national identity with opt-in global federation), Blacksky (community governance via People's Assembly and community creation tools), Eurosky (European digital sovereignty funded by crowdfunding)
- The author warns against "protocol eschatology"—believing that good protocols will automatically lead to adoption and that institutional forms will naturally emerge as ecosystems mature
- This framing removes human agency from the equation when the actual question is who will do the building work
- Resilient networks are produced by specific people making specific decisions to run servers at specific moments, not by protocol features alone
- The future of open social networks depends on figuring out what organizational structures will motivate people to actually build and maintain infrastructure, not on protocol specifications
Decoder
- Fediverse: The network of federated social platforms (primarily Mastodon, but also Pixelfed, PeerTube, etc.) that use ActivityPub to communicate
- ActivityPub: The W3C protocol that defines how actors on the fediverse send each other messages, but doesn't actually specify servers or network topology
- atproto: Bluesky's AT Protocol, designed with explicit decentralization features like splitting identity, storage, and moderation into independent components
- Atmosphere: The ecosystem of services and platforms built on atproto, analogous to how the fediverse uses ActivityPub
- Credible exit: The ability for users to leave a platform and take their data/identity to another provider without needing permission
- Appview: In atproto architecture, the component that aggregates and displays content (like the Bluesky app), separate from data storage and other components
- Disintermediation: Splitting a monolithic system into independent components (identity, storage, moderation, feeds) that can be separately operated and swapped
- Protocol eschatology: The belief that protocol adoption and ecosystem success is inevitable rather than requiring specific human effort to build and maintain
Original article
Recent DDoS attacks on Bluesky and Mastodon highlight that “decentralization” alone doesn't guarantee resilience—what matters is how systems are actually operated and maintained in practice. The fediverse appears more resilient today due to a large, human-driven network of independently run servers, while the future of open social networks depends less on protocols and more on whether people and organizations are willing to actively build and sustain them.
Explore all 55 articles in today's digest
Fresh dev news, AI-digested daily. Never miss a trend at devoured.fyi