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You can run your own relays, the obstacle is that each relay takes up many terabytes. But it’s fully open.
https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds
https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/entries/Notes on Running a Full-Network atproto Relay (July 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42094369
https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/firehose
https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/federation-architecture#relay
Twitter was a vapid load of crap before Elmo took it over. I see this as a win if it knocks him down a peg or 44 billion.
He paid 44bil for him and his corrupt buddies to oan the US.
Worth every penny
Wasn’t like the US people couldn’t have trivially prevented that by actually going to the votes instead of not voting. At some point it’s willful on behalf of the people. 🤷
Yeah if everyone was reasonable and voted in their own self interests and actually researched canidates then we would have a global utopia by now.
Yoo bad it will never happen because all it takes to make them apathetic is buy and then poison their favorite social media app.
Lol
Feed the butterflies,
Tupence a bag…
What’s wrong with Bluesky? From my perspective it looks pretty dang wholesome. Could someone please elaborate?
It’s genuinely just people feeling the need to “pick a side”, and it’s unhelpful. Just makes the fans look like clowns.
Bluesky’s got the same vibe as early Twitter (for now). That’s awesome. Mastodon / “the fediverse” can take some time to streamline onboarding so when Bluesky gets sold to Mussolini’s ghost Mastodon will be ready to take the reins.
It failed lemmys rigid purity test.
Oh really. I don’t know what that is. I’ll try to look that up. Thanks!
If the internet has a future, it’s on the Fediverse. We work around capitalism to avoid enshittification, or we let it defer our future further.
In the meantime, the Fediverse needs to get shiny and intuitive. The sign that something is cumbersome and hard to use is people saying “it’s not that bad”.
People may disagree with how BlueSky is organized and architected, but I get why they decided to do what they did. User experience.
Their architectural decisions mean that people don’t have to worry about instances confusing people, and the org structure means is easy to staff a proper dedicated experience team that can be working, planning, and testing before big expensive decisions are committed to code.
Bluesky is apart of the Fediverse and the quicker ActivityPub sites accommodate that fact the quicker we’ll have an open internet.
This pissing fight between ActivityPub sites and Bluesky is dumb and doesn’t further an open internet.
Not directed at you but to a lot, go put time into making Mastodon compatible with atProto instead of bitching.
Didn’t BlueSky come up with their own federation system because… Fuck you?
I mean, what was wrong with using the ActivityPub standard?
I can’t find the source but if I recall bluesky relies on running feeds through central servers and it has patents on its methods so I would say bsky federation has some asterisks. They have done a great job insulating users from the structural elements which reduces confusion.
You forgot one main thing, 🤑🤑🤑🤑.
Filing as a B corp wouldn’t be my first choice if I was trying to prioritize getting rich.
That is how it usually starts. It start innocent but the moment you see potential money or the funding runs out you either become like OpenAI, Google or go obscure worst bankruptcy. It does not help that their protocol is basically how search engine works today. They control the flow of information and funded by venture capital.
Yeah probably. If you told me in 2013 that reddit would go to shit in 2023 I would not really do anything different. Knowing bluesky will go to shit wouldn’t really change anything (if I was a fan of the Twitter format) either.
I think the hate for BlueSky is proof that it’s important enough to work. Buhbye elon
I don’t really under the hate towards BlueSky, did they do something really unacceptable that I am missing out on?
The idea is that these social media sites always become monopolies. That occurs because no one can communicate with each other across platforms, which eventually leads to a majority of users migrating to a single platform over time. Once that happens, the social media group no longer has to try and the media site enshittifies slowly over time. On top of this, the insane amount of users also cripples the centralized system’s ability to self-moderate properly, leading to user-based enshittification as well.
With federated social media, that barrier doesn’t exist, and, in theory, the subsequent conglomeration of users doesn’t happen. Additionally, federated instances can be self-hosted and sport much smaller userbases which can make self-moderation much simpler.
The joke in the video is that rather than switching to federated social media like mastodon and lemmy, twitter users chose to go to yet another centralized social media site (which while having a federation protocol, is unlikely to have users utilizing that defederation). Essentially, Billy is abandoning twitter to go to another site which will potentially have the same downward trend as twitter did before.
Mastodon is gatekept to hell and back, the technicalities of federation are exposed to the user for some reason (you already lose half your potential user base right there), infighting between instances means that you won’t see the entire discourse of a post depending on which instance you’re at…
And besides all that, bsky is not as “corpo” as mastodon fanboys make it out to be. They’re on track to open up to privately hosted instances as well, and you can already run most of their backend stuff yourself.
As much as I like the ‘decentralized’ stuff, the technical part of federation should NEVER be exposed to the end user if you want the platform to be mainstream. I still don’t understand why a lot of federated projects think it’s a good idea to expose that to the end user.
Dude, do you even email?
Whenever Lemmy or Masto gets a flood of new users, a portion of them never make it past the instance selection and totally bail.
The user experience was designed by people who literally respond to user feedback by telling users to commit new code to the project.
It’s clearly designed by engineers who assume other users will be just like them.
This of the core of the problem. Github energy.
Fine for a hobby. Not good enough for a public-facing product.
Now take all of these replies. THIS is what they don’t understand. All of these replies tell exactly how I feel about this.
If bluesky ever becomes actually federated, won’t it have the same problem?
The way sign up currently is, probably not. It would still default to bsky.social and your average person isn’t going to think about it.
But then it’s not federated. It’s all on one giant monolith of a server. Perhaps the traffic is shared between machines, but that’s not the same thing as federated.
Below is how account portability work between servers, it is easy to migrate between servers.
Account portability
We assume that a Personal Data Server may fail at any time, either by going offline in its entirety, or by ceasing service for specific users. The goal of the AT Protocol is to ensure that a user can migrate their account to a new PDS without the server’s involvement.
User data is stored in signed data repositories and verified by DIDs. Signed data repositories are like Git repos but for database records, and DIDs are essentially registries of user certificates, similar in some ways to the TLS certificate system. They are expected to be secure, reliable, and independent of the user’s PDS.
Each DID document publishes two public keys: a signing key and a recovery key.
Signing key: Asserts changes to the DID Document and to the user’s data repository.
Recovery key: Asserts changes to the DID Document; may override the signing key within a 72-hour window.
The signing key is entrusted to the PDS so that it can manage the user’s data, but the recovery key is saved by the user, e.g. as a paper key. This makes it possible for the user to update their account to a new PDS without the original host’s help.
A backup of the user’s data will be persistently synced to their client as a backup (contingent on the disk space available). Should a PDS disappear without notice, the user should be able to migrate to a new provider by updating their DID Document and uploading the backup
What other server is there?
Probably not. Currently it seems on track that you’re always first on their main instance. If you’re technically inclined you could then start hosting a federated part yourself (or joining one), but this does not change that the actual entry experience is exactly the same as on Twitter, hence why transition is so insanely smooth and painless.
I think a lot of the attitude I saw on mastodon about this like a year ago was one of suspicion that they wanted an open network but didn’t use the fediverse standard
Which AFAIK isn’t a standard, so… 🤷
ActivityPub is a W3C standard, though.
I assume the main reason is that ActivityPub is a mess and quite overcomplicated for bsky’s needs. Being permanently tied to it seems like a big risk. There’s no reason why they couldn’t make a compatibility layer later and hook into it.
Friendship ended with Mastodon
My new best friend is Bluesky
Community owned centralized systems are the answer.
why the fuck does no one change the trashass looking shadowed white impact font default text treatment on the meme generator
That takes effort and would invalidate it as a shitpost.
Readability > style
Its got faults but it’s currently where the big batch of users seems to be going and since some of my interests are pretty narrow that means a lot more to read and see in those interests (or it exists at all). That’s kinda hard to ignore tbh. Its not right wing infested and I’ve already got elon, musk, trump and a bunch of other stuff auto filtered.
Isn’t Bluesky federated?
Pseudo-federated from what people are saying. Something about the user accounts being centralised but the data being decentralised. I don’t understand but it’s something funded by the previous owner of Twitter and full of other corporate money, so I wouldn’t trust it.
Jack Dorsey has nothing by to do with Bluesky and hasn’t for a while now.
Holy shit, Dorsey is eve fucking dumber than I could have ever imagined:
The Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has left the board of Bluesky, the decentralised social network he helped start, and encouraged users to remain on his first site, now owned by Elon Musk and called X.
Dorsey confirmed he had cut ties with Bluesky on Sunday, telling a user on X that he was no longer on the social network’s board. The announcement was apparently unexpected, since Bluesky still listed him as a board member until late on Sunday evening.
…
“Don’t depend on corporations to grant you rights,” Dorsey tweeted. “Defend them yourself using freedom technology. (you’re on one).”
there is a critical ‘relay’ component that only they control. so you can setup your own ‘node’, but only connected to their instance.
nly a single instance of the relay exists and they are not releasing that code and a few other pieces. it federates only with itself.
That pretty much sounds centralised. But I guess people don’t care if they don’t have to worry about “picking a server” which is “too complicated” 🤷
you pick a server with bluesky
That’s exactly what people want: no brainer alternative without the fediverse’s fragmentation
i think the new paradigm of the distributed fediverse is going to take a long time to propagate to the masses. its going to be lots of platforms advertising their corner of the 'verse and the features they permit… but we really need to get the idea of the ‘fediverse’ into their heads that its content accessible by any of those platforms.
the thing ive noticed is no one cares about ‘sites’ anymore… the kids all want ‘apps’ which is drivin me bonkers. spent decades building mobile-friendly, dynamic viewports only for them to get ignored cuz kids dont want to type in a URL/domain.
OT, but most of my students in their 20s can barely use keyboards. It really stresses them out and they get mad about it. Papers are either copy-paste then AI filtered a few times, or speech-to-text with a quick grammerly scan. Drives me bonkers too. Just to say, I’m sorry your work isn’t appreciated.
“The Digital Native generation are technological geniuses because they can usually intuit which icon to click. Let us praise them and give them as much screentime as we can.” - All the news pieces and academic articles from 2000-2010ish
If you look at how RSS fell from use, there were two major issues. On the user side, users had to go out to find content as there wasn’t an inherent way to search for content within the system. On the creator side, creators had to deal with advertising themselves to users and they had to handle the monetization by themselves.
Social media created the algorithm to find content and developed some revenue sharing with creators.
If federated media takes off, it will probably look like Threads or Truth Social, where control of a front end monetizes development of the platform.
My impression is that it hasn’t been users that have pushed everything into apps, it’s been publishers. This is all a part of a general trend where software has become much less about what it can do for the user, and much more about what data it can extract from a user for the publisher. Websites generally have a lot more protections against such data scraping, meanwhile you can put who knows what code into an app.
In theory, yes. In practice, it’s a bit different. At the very least for now.
well, until they release all the code, and allow full federation its not a federating platform. end of story.
I believe it’s sort of tacked on and not exactly federated at the moment. Also it’s corporate run
It calls itself federated, but it’s false advertising.
Nope. It’s unambiguously not federated. It maybe could be, if you take their words at face value
I think there might be some adapters bridging the distance… But the short answer is no, the long answer is not really
In theory, yes / kind of.
In practice, no, not really.
It uses a different protocol (AT protocol) than the Fediverse ActivityPub protocol, which is what lemmy and mastadon and pixelfed are all built on, so it is not natively interoperable with ActivityPub based Fediverse.
To do that you have to use bridging software of some kind.
Also, as others have pointed out… even if you do make the approximate equivalent of your own instance, a PDS… all of these still go through ‘Relays’, which BlueSky controls.
So… it is technically federated in the sense that it allows for anyone to make their own instance/PDS… but ultimately it is actually totally centralized.
Instead of a web or weave of many to many connections of independent admins/maintainers, the structure much more resembles a top down hierarchy that is ultimately all controlled by a profit driven corporation.
If the Relays go down, everything goes down.
If BlueSky decides they don’t appreciate your instance, they have unitary power to delist or block it, from everyone.
As compared with the Fediverse, where many different instances and communities can all pick and choose for themselves which other instances and communities they do and do not federate with, and where an outage particular to one community/instance only bricks that particular community/instance.
seriously.
please show me a single, fully independant instance of their platform that federates.
you cant, because it doesnt exist.
I mean, ATP has only been around for two years, mastodon has been around for 8 years with 6 years of development on AP.
Development takes time, I feel like “show it to me now or it’s a lie” is a poor take.
The code for their instance isn’t open source, so it’s legitimately impossible to host another relay. So until that changes, yes, it’s a lie
Isn’t this the source for the relay? https://github.com/bluesky-social/indigo/tree/main/cmd/bigsky
And even then the readme says:
A note and reminder about Relays in general are that they are more of a convenience in the protocol than a hard requirement. The “firehose” API is the exact same on the PDS and on a Relay. Any service which subscribes to the Relay could instead connect to one or more PDS instances directly.
And the PDS source code is here: https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds
EDIT: The PDS source is actually here: https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/tree/main/packages/pds the other link is for self hosting.
Bluesky Social has pledged to transfer the protocol’s development to a standards body such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in the near future.[11]
Let’s see it then. I’m concerned when the opportunity to profit arises that perverse motives will occur.
Absolutely agree. An aspirational goal to an open standard is not an open standard.
