Identifying Roadblocks in Building Decentralized Apps

Bluesky is one of the well-known decentralized social apps with millions of users. However, measurement studies show that it may not have fully achieved the goal of decentralization, that is, putting all the control power of the app in the hands of end users. This paper takes Bluesky as a case study to investigate the reasons for the observed centralization and identifies two technical roadblocks in building fully decentralized apps.