[HN Gopher] Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters
___________________________________________________________________
Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters
Author : jakebsky
Score : 426 points
Date : 2024-02-22 18:30 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bsky.social)
(TXT) w3m dump (bsky.social)
| nickthegreek wrote:
| Personal Data Server (PDS) github link:
| https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds
| bayindirh wrote:
| Does that mean after Bluesky reaches critical mass, it'll turn
| the federation off, like Google Chat killing its XMPP federation?
|
| For clarity: I'd love to see this comment and say "I was wrong" 5
| or 10 years later.
| jakebsky wrote:
| The network is designed to be "locked open" in a way that
| prevents this. The architecture is designed to work like the
| web.
| yupyup54133 wrote:
| Nothing against Bluesky, but I think we are all a little
| jaded after seeing decades of the "embrace, extend,
| extinguish" pattern.
| lolinder wrote:
| This would be more "create, extinguish", because there's no
| existing AT protocol network to embrace.
| hardcopy wrote:
| "embrace" would be the rise of decentralized social media
| lolinder wrote:
| If there can exist an "extinguish" step for the concept
| of decentralized social media itself then decentralized
| social media has already failed. The whole point is
| supposed to be about changing hearts and minds to embrace
| self-governance, a rug pull should just result in people
| moving somewhere else.
| secstate wrote:
| But that's sort of why Bluesky is not really
| decentralized, just federated. It's a pretty significant
| difference. Mastodon is federated and decentralized.
| Twitter is non-federated and centralized. Bluesky is
| trying to be the federated, centralized option.
|
| Whether that works, we'll see. I for one just gave up
| social media about 8 years ago and, while feeling like
| I'm missing something flares up from time to time, it's
| nothing like the disaster my online life was before I
| gave it up. It wasn't a problem of missing federation or
| not being centralized. It was inherent to the way social
| media functions against my person.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| How is BlueSky centralized? I could see that argument
| before this feature shipped, but "BlueSky is trying to be
| the federated, centralized option" goes counter to what
| the team has said directly.
|
| I could _maybe_ see an argument not based on technical
| premises, but instead something like "it will defacto
| become one because running a relay is too expensive" or
| such. Is that what you're going for?
| Balladeer wrote:
| I'm not who you replied to, but yes, that's my main
| concern: Bluesky is still a company building a thing to
| pay back the money it owes investors.
|
| I worry that Bluesky becomes the de facto central actor
| and, due to having no stated business plan and a
| countdown to repay the money they took, pulls a Google,
| leveraging its dominance to introduce proprietary,
| breaking changes.
|
| Yes, right now, the tech, team, interviews, etc sound
| mission-driven, but "revenue is the dominant term"[2] in
| the equation of a company's life, and there's still a
| very real chance that Bluesky dominates whatever
| federated AT Protocol network ends up forming, then uses
| that leverage to walk back all this promised openness.
|
| I'm cautiously interested in Bluesky, but I'm watching
| for this kind of de facto dominance and we're probably
| too early on to see where the AT network is headed.
|
| - [1] https://somehowmanage.com/2020/09/20/revenue-model-
| not-cultu...
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Being jaded is understandable, but because this critique is
| generic, it is applicable to literally anything and
| everything. I don't see how you can ever get something
| that's considered good if you always assume it will turn
| into something bad regardless of its current stance.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Actually it's very hard, and becomes tiring after some
| point. I personally always keep a hope that I'll be wrong
| in the long run.
|
| Sometimes I'm spot on, sometimes I stand corrected. The
| problem is, as time goes, your free time reserve starts
| to decline. You optimize things, consolidate services,
| etc., and these kind of migrations start to take tons of
| time.
|
| Because of this, I gave "big web" up and moved to "small
| web", and always have plans to evacuate any service in a
| moment's notice.
|
| It's like being a doomsday-preparer from a point, but at
| least I have backups and backup plans for everything.
| itsanaccount wrote:
| Thats easy, you don't have a structure made with a single
| large actor capable of changing the rules of the game mid
| flight.
|
| You get something good system by sharing power, not by
| once again falling for "trust us bro." You get it by
| understanding power imbalances and avoiding them the same
| way my dog avoids objects with large amounts of potential
| energy, because they're predictably dangerous.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| I understand this, yet, when presented with exactly this,
| the response was "well what about EEE."
| preciousoo wrote:
| The protocol and hosting mechanisms are open source.
| There's one actor currently sure, but it seems like
| bluesky is not holding onto that.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| what binds this? I have no interest in joining if Jack can
| sell to Elon again and a switch gets flipped
| steveklabnik wrote:
| That specific scenario is impossible, in my understanding,
| because Jack does not have an ownership stake in the
| company.
|
| This release, of federation, is in my mind a major answer
| to the _real_ question you 're asking, which is the same
| but with "the employees" instead of "Jack," as they have
| the equity stake.
|
| Once things are federated, other folks gain power over the
| protocol, by virtue of usage. If Bluesky PBLLC starts to do
| shady things, the other instances can refuse to do so, and
| talk to each other instead.
|
| This is why the split between AT and BlueSky is important,
| and why this news matters, as it is meaningfully delivering
| on the desire to protect against such a thing.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Right I didn't mean to get into the business aspect, but
| essentially "what prevents someone from undoing this for
| money." Thanks for the detail.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| It's all good. The Jack thing is, in my mind, a bit
| sensitive, because a lot of people criticizing BlueSky
| talk as though Jack runs the place, owns it, etc, all of
| which seems factually incorrect. He has a board seat, but
| seemingly cares about it so little that he deleted his
| account. From what I hear, nostr is his focus, but I'm
| not on there so I can't speak to that personally.
| mort96 wrote:
| Jack has certainly been successful in building a general
| perception that bsky is "the Twitter founder's" next
| social network project, intentionally or otherwise
| mdasen wrote:
| The issue here is that if 99% of people use BlueSky and
| 1% use non-BlueSky AtProto servers, that leaves BlueSky
| with all the power to turn off federation. If BlueSky
| starts to do shady things, other instances can refuse and
| talk to each other instead - and eliminate 99% of your
| followers, 99% of the people you're following, etc.
|
| Email is open, but if GMail decides to block all email
| from you, you're toast. And while GMail is large, their
| percentage of email inboxes pales in comparison to
| BlueSky's percentage of AtProto users (which is near 100%
| at the moment).
|
| Yes, once things are federated, other folks _start_
| gaining _some_ power over the protocol _by virtue of
| usage._ However, if 99% of people remain with BlueSky,
| everyone else essentially has no power.
|
| mastodon.social has around 15% of the Fediverse on its
| server and it means that it has a lot of power. Mastodon
| (the software) is around 72% of the Fediverse which means
| that other ActivityPub software essentially has to use
| Mastodon-flavored ActivityPub with whatever quirks might
| exist in Mastodon. But that's still way less power than
| BlueSky has in the AtProto ecosystem.
|
| Open protocols are only good as long as there's enough
| reason for lots of different parties to keep those lines
| of communication open. mastodon.social needs to keep
| supporting ActivityPub because they'd lose 85% of their
| network if they stopped. Let's say it's 2030 and AtProto
| has 500M users and 99% of them are using BlueSky. BlueSky
| could simply turn off all the AtProto endpoints and make
| their web and mobile apps use proprietary endpoints. I'm
| not saying they'd do that, but they certainly could. Now,
| if 2030 comes around and there are 500M AtProto users and
| 10% of them are on BlueSky, then it wouldn't really be
| possible for BlueSky to turn off AtProto. They'd lose 90%
| of their network.
|
| But we don't know if AtProto will catch on outside of
| BlueSky or if BlueSky will remain the vast majority of
| the network. If there isn't a lot of use outside of
| BlueSky, there could come a day when it's very tempting
| to turn it off - or do something that isn't quite turning
| it off, but would effectively accomplish it. Maybe they
| just start making breaking changes to AtProto, rolling it
| out, and documenting the change a week later and third
| parties just end up unreliable and people migrate off
| them. There's lots of options.
|
| Five years from now, how is BlueSky making money? Are
| they just storing, processing, and serving lots of
| content without good monetization as third party apps
| start grabbing users and making money off their servers?
| I mean, we saw what Reddit and Twitter did. If BlueSky
| controls 99% of AtProto users, they can turn the firehose
| off. Even if they aren't trying to be evil or maximize
| their revenue, at some point they need money for all
| those engineers and servers. Maybe the official BlueSky
| app will be popular enough for them to get some ad
| revenue there and not feel the need to go after third
| party apps. Maybe a lot of things.
|
| But until BlueSky is a minority of AtProto
| users/posts/etc., it's still something they have a lot of
| power over - including the power to pivot BlueSky off
| AtProto and make BlueSky a proprietary network.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| For sure. One nice thing about AT's design is that, if
| they do, you can take your posts over to some other host,
| and it'll all Just Work. True account portability makes
| that kind of power grab harder. Of course, that would
| require users to actually move, which is not a given.
|
| Time will tell!
| jorams wrote:
| In the same way that Google stopped federating by no longer
| accepting connections from others, as long as most people
| keep their stuff at Bluesky they can also just close
| themselves off from others again. I don't necessarily think
| it is a big risk, but the only reason the web is resilient to
| this is that no single ISP controls enough of the network to
| take it "private".
|
| Basically, until atproto is much bigger than bsky.app, the
| situation is not very different.
| mort96 wrote:
| How can it "lock open"? If 90+% of users are on the official
| bluesky servers, what could possibly technically prevent
| bluesky from just no longer federating with other hosts?
| Repulsion9513 wrote:
| > A central directory server collects and validates
| operations, and maintains a transparent log of operations for
| each DID.
|
| (https://github.com/did-method-plc/did-method-
| plc/blob/main/R... linked from
| https://docs.bsky.app/blog/self-host-federation)
| rsynnott wrote:
| That would only work if Bluesky stays the only significant
| network node. Which is _possible_, but we haven't seen it with,
| say, Mastodon. Google Chat was arguably a bit of a special
| case; vast majority of users never used federation at all,
| whereas any Bluesky user will, pretty much, just by naturally
| using Bluesky.
| treyd wrote:
| It worked with Mastodon because it was diverse and well-
| distributed from the beginning even when it was young. I'm
| skeptical that other people are going to run their own BS
| servers at scale now that it's been normalized to always just
| use the firstparty one.
| wmf wrote:
| If they really want to they can fix this by closing the
| central server.
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| ... and if not, what the heck is the business model here?
| steveklabnik wrote:
| BlueSky's first revenue generation (in my understanding, I
| don't work there) has been a partnership with NameCheap that
| makes it easy for non-technical users to purchase a domain
| name and use it as their BlueSky username.
|
| They have been a bit vague about other ways to generate
| revenue, except in one case: they will _not_ be using
| advertisements to monetize.
| threeseed wrote:
| That business model is laughable. The percentage of users
| who care about a domain name, are willing to pay a
| subscription for it and don't have one already has to be in
| the single digits.
|
| They better have a good answer to this because it's a
| threat to the ecosystem as a whole if they don't. Because
| relying on VC money in this environment is not the smartest
| thing to do.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| I would agree that if that were "the business model"
| instead of "a thing that generates some revenue," it
| would be laughable. However, nobody, including BlueSky,
| believes that this is solely enough to power the
| business.
|
| I agree that a healthy Bluesky PBLLC is a good thing, and
| hope they manage to pull it off. Time will tell.
| threeseed wrote:
| Well hopefully they take it more seriously.
|
| Because based on them raising $8m in a seed round middle
| of last year they aren't going to have much time to
| decide and implement a strategy before they will need to
| start thinking about raising a Series A. Or maybe Jack
| does become a bigger investor.
|
| Either way I think it's insane to prematurely rule out
| advertising.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| I don't think they're not taking it seriously.
|
| I also don't believe (and again, don't work there, just a
| huge fan, so maybe this is wrong) I'm not sure that the
| revenue was the reason for shipping this feature. It's
| best thought of as an accessibility feature, for folks
| who do not know what a "DNS record" is and have never
| hosted a domain. Without this, more technical users get
| something special that non-technical users do not: a
| nicer username. The money is just a side effect of the
| fact that purchasing a domain name already requires
| money, and so a partnership with a revenue split just
| makes sense.
|
| > Either way I think it's insane to prematurely rule out
| advertising.
|
| I hear you in an abstract "that's the way you make money
| in this space" sense, but I also think it's a smart
| reaction to the public sentiment around this stuff.
| People do not like advertising. It is a differentiator.
| We'll see if it works out for them or not.
| layer8 wrote:
| The whole point of Bluesky is to build a social network
| that is not incentivized by advertising. They don't rule
| it out completely, but it can't be a major part of their
| revenue.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| > They don't rule it out completely,
|
| Well,
|
| > Are you thinking about advertisements at all?
|
| >
|
| > There will always be free options, and we can't
| enshittify the network with ads. This is where federation
| comes in. The fact that anyone can self-host and anyone
| can build on the software means that we'll never be able
| to degrade the user experience in a way where people want
| to leave.
|
| https://www.wired.com/story/bluesky-ceo-jay-graber-wont-
| ensh...
|
| This reads as definitive to me personally.
| layer8 wrote:
| In their business-plan post, they stated: "We set out to
| build a protocol where users can own their data and
| always have the freedom to leave, and this approach means
| that advertising couldn't be our dominant business
| model." Which reads like advertising could still be a
| possibility, but not as a dominant factor.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Fair!
| Repulsion9513 wrote:
| > enshittify with ads
|
| > we'll never be able to degrade the user experience in a
| way where people want to leave
|
| Neither of those is the same as "no ads". They're just
| saying that they can't make the ads so bad that most
| people want to leave, because then people will leave and
| the ads won't be shown to anyone.
| jakebsky wrote:
| Reddit destroyed Apollo so they could inject ads into the
| Reddit experience.
|
| Bluesky doesn't have the ability to do this. There's no
| API key to revoke that could stop someone else from
| running parallel apps/infrastructure/etc. The network is
| completely open.
| Repulsion9513 wrote:
| Reddit had ads long before they destroyed Apollo. Thanks
| for providing additional evidence for my point.
| jakebsky wrote:
| Sure, but Apollo made it easy for users that didn't want
| ads to use Reddit without them. Destroying Apollo removed
| that ability for most people.
|
| I'm about as anti-ads as it gets but I don't object to
| _other_ people using apps with ads in them, if that 's
| their choice.
| layer8 wrote:
| See https://bsky.social/about/blog/7-05-2023-business-plan
| mm263 wrote:
| I think they nailed every Mastodon criticism that I've heard
| floating around and addressed it, however I'm especially curious
| to learn about the moderation layer in-depth.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| I'm kind of tired of social networks in general, but this is
| attractive to me just because of that. I like Mastodon, but the
| underlying ActivityPub protocol was rather underwhelming.
| sangnoir wrote:
| Is the AT protocol is superior in your opinion?
| unshavedyak wrote:
| I don't know enough about it to give feedback. However
| Martin Kleppmann's[1] involvement is a huge selling point
| to me. It's also, seemingly, good enough that they're
| building very useful things on top of it like PDS,
| migrating users, etc.
|
| ActivityPub (AP) felt a bit like "good enough to get
| something done", which is amazing on one hand - people can
| do a lot with it. But it also means some harder problems
| are totally ignored[2], so the landscape between instances
| felt rocky to me. I also heavily disliked how federation
| worked in AP, ie how the protocol felt like it favored
| centralized instances because small instances were less
| likely to be pinged, were lower priority, in general was
| very spammy, etc. Not that the AP proto did anything to
| cause that.. it just didn't do anything to address it in my
| view, it was just data.
|
| Does AT fix my concerns over AP? No idea. But i appreciate
| a proto that had a bit more time in the oven and being used
| to (maybe) solve the harder problems that i experienced
| with AP.
|
| [1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03239 [2]: These are only
| my opinions from a very brief stint in trying to write an
| AP client to federate with Mastodon, Lemmy and Kbin. I did
| not dive deep into AP, so please don't judge it from my
| experience.
| mariusor wrote:
| Rather underwhelming from which point of view?
| unshavedyak wrote:
| From the point of view of a small federated client
| developer, exploring the ActivityPub protocol. Far from
| thorough or objective.
| mariusor wrote:
| There is barely any project that supports client to
| server ActivityPub protocol, so from that point of view
| is underwhelming, yes. If you tried to implement a
| Mastodon compatible client, that's a different thing
| though.
| treyd wrote:
| What's nice about the architecture most fedi software
| including Mastodon follow is that if a better protocol than
| ActivityPub comes along (like perhaps, Spritely) they can add
| support for it and concurrently federate with both protocols.
| Mastodon used to do this with OStatus.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| > I'm especially curious to learn about the moderation layer
| in-depth.
|
| You'll want to read:
|
| * "Composable Moderation," this is the core conceptual idea:
| https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-13-2023-moderation
|
| * "Moderation in a Public Commons," which describes specific
| features that were added in pursuit of the previously-described
| goal https://bsky.social/about/blog/6-23-2023-moderation-
| proposal...
|
| * "Bluesky 2023 Moderation Report," which discusses
| specifically how (what is now) the main instance was moderated
| last year
| https://bsky.social/about/blog/01-16-2024-moderation-2023
| j-james wrote:
| I cannot see how BlueSky's moderation system can ever work.
| Decoupling moderation and hosting means there's no onus to
| _do_ the moderation that they describe: which makes me think
| it will be BlueSky Inc., and only other corporations, that
| have resources to throw employees at a now thankless,
| Facebook-style moderation job. And instances have to moderate
| _anyway_ , in order to not host illegal content.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| I hear you on some level. That said, we are already seeing
| people creating blocklists, and tools to share them with
| others. That is happening alongside the company's
| investment in paying people to work on T&S related issues
| on their instance.
|
| I am not sure if it will succeed or fail, but I am
| interested to see how it plays out.
| j-james wrote:
| That relies upon the benevolence of corporations to much
| more of an extent than I am comfortable with. 20 years of
| social media has convinced me that that's a bad idea.
| And, I think, it removes much of the benefits of
| federation: if the only way to sustainably moderate is to
| rely upon gifts from BlueSky Inc., moderation is going to
| be necessarily dependent upon them.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| To me, the company moderating their instance feels like
| _additional_ moderation capacity, rather than replacing
| it.
|
| I don't believe I subscribe to any blocklists on BlueSky.
| If I end up doing so, it is much more likely to be one
| run by someone I trust than by a company. Having the
| option of either seems worthwhile to me.
| dorfsmay wrote:
| Blacklists feel more like reinforcing the echo chamber
| than moderation.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Then you are free to not subscribe to any of them, and
| see every post. It is under your control.
| sneak wrote:
| A lot of the popular users subscribe to the blocklists
| uncritically. It breaks the UX of the site if you get
| placed on one.
| shkkmo wrote:
| As the plaform matures so will the blocklist ecosystem.
| Hopefully blocklists with good appeal mechanisms will win
| mindshare.
| archagon wrote:
| Users are not entitled to the dissemination of their
| opinions. Either you let users block other users or you
| will turn your site into a cesspit.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > Decoupling moderation and hosting means there's no onus
| to do the moderation that they describe:
|
| I'm not sure this follows. There is a similarity to the
| reddit model of moderation. The host provides some base
| amount of moderation but supplemental moderation comes from
| members of the community. In the Bluesky model, a
| 'subreddit' is analagous to an indexer/aggregator (aka
| Relay/AppView) that provides a moderated and/or weighted
| feed of content. The same incentives for volunteer mods on
| Reddit will exist for volunteer mods on Bluesky.
| numpad0 wrote:
| One of difficulties with content moderation is it's been
| targeted by some as a tool available for the few to control
| and shape public opinions to far narrower degrees than
| legally required, which is harmful to free speech. I'm not
| completely sure but externalizing that part probably
| mitigates that issue a bit.
|
| EU is moving towards requiring all social media obey EU
| laws, under loose notion that their laws is the least
| restrictive and most reasonable. No one is, and the sum of
| all ethical standards on Earth is not going to be something
| very popular, so that's nonsense. OTOH, it's perfectly
| reasonable that content served at scale in a region will
| have to be lawful; "this content you want removed is lawful
| in MY country" is sort of nonsense too. So moderation
| decoupling and, ahem, _moderation localization_ is going to
| be necessary for social media. I suppose that 's where
| they're going.
| timeon wrote:
| Interesting that you have picked EU, while sites like
| Twitter are already blocking or removing content on
| request of countries like Turkey, China or Russia.
| hnbad wrote:
| Communities are built on shared values and expectations
| of what is or isn't acceptable conduct. If a guest to
| your club house starts pooping on the carpet, you throw
| them out not only because you don't want that to happen
| in your club house but also because throwing them out
| demonstrates to the other people in your club house that
| they can expect there to be actual consequences to that
| kind of behavior, allowing them to feel safe knowing that
| they won't have to worry about it. Bluesky's solution
| apparently boils down to just telling everyone to ignore
| the poop guy and giving them the option to not be able to
| see him.
|
| The problem with censorship isn't the enforcement of
| rules. The problem with censorship is the enforcement of
| rules the individual that has to enforce them doesn't
| agree with. Free speech absolutism on social media is
| often argued for with appeals to "the town square" but
| the difference between social media and an actual town
| square is that if you make a complete ass out of yourself
| in an actual town square, eventually someone will punch
| you.
| shkkmo wrote:
| It'd be nice to see an updated version of those that
| describes how those ideas and tools relate to a self/third-
| party hosting. The best I can tell, this is the model:
|
| My understanding is that each host has control over what they
| host and can subscribe to third party content filtering
| services to help do so.
|
| Then various indexes/aggregators (potentially third party)
| crawl hosts and provide services to find content. This is
| where voting or toxicity checks can be applied to manipulate
| reach.
|
| This content is also tag-able via third party services (and
| may be used by indexes/aggregators).
|
| The user is then able to select/configure indexes/aggregators
| and filter based on tags.
| jakebsky wrote:
| Hey HN, the engineering team at Bluesky is especially excited to
| get to this point! We're happy to help answer questions and help
| anyone trying to run their own PDS host. Things should work
| pretty well for self-hosters right now, but we're standing by to
| help if there are any problems.
|
| Technical details and the installer are in the GitHub repo
| https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds
|
| And we're on Discord available to help:
| https://discord.com/invite/UWS6FFdhMe
| jakobdabo wrote:
| Congratulations on the release! If I may ask a question - is it
| possible to register an account without a phone number on a
| 3-rd party server?
| jakebsky wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| Yes, it's totally up to a PDS operator to decide how they
| create user accounts. It's also not required on the Bluesky
| PDS service any longer, in most cases.
|
| By default the self-hosted PDS requires an invite code, to
| prevent random people from creating an account. Later other
| options will exist, including OAuth support which is coming
| soon.
| jakobdabo wrote:
| That's great, thanks!
|
| > It's also not required on the Bluesky service any longer,
| in most cases.
|
| That's also nice to hear - when last time I tried to
| register an account (shortly after the free registration
| launch) the phone number field in the registration form was
| marked as required, if I am not mistaken.
| jakebsky wrote:
| Yeah, you're right, it was. That was temporary measure
| during the public launch to prevent spam/abuse. We've
| made some improvements here recently.
| clot27 wrote:
| Hi, what is the status of integration with the activitypub
| protocol? as its currently the most popular protocol in
| federated social media
| Arnt wrote:
| There's a bridge nowadays, but... see
| https://pleromanonx86.wordpress.com/2024/02/17/mastodon-
| date... which also links to
| https://wedistribute.org/2024/02/tear-down-walls-not-
| bridges... https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/14/bluesky-and-
| mastodon-users... and https://news.itsfoss.com/bluesky-
| mastodon-bridge/
| kstrauser wrote:
| That was quit the mess. Ryan Barrett is a smart guy and
| seems quite nice, but it was very ill-advised to
| unilaterally decide to build an opt-out bridge. In general,
| if users one platform A want their stuff to be on platform
| B, they'll find a way to make that happen. If someone else
| takes it upon themselves to copy everything from A to B,
| people understandably get pretty bent about it.
|
| If it had been an opt-in system, the response would
| probably have been far different.
| Repulsion9513 wrote:
| Public is public.
|
| And someone else will just go build an opt-out (or maybe
| even no opt-out!) bridge.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Nah. Consent is a thing and this wasn't consensual. Yes,
| the posts were publicly accessible, but the intent of
| posting to Mastodon isn't to have it show up
| automatically on another network. It's technically
| possible, yes. It's still a dick thing to do and it
| pissed people off.
|
| And again, it wasn't about Bluesky in particular. If
| Google announced that they were going to ingest all
| Mastodon content and post it in a new Google Groups kind
| of thing, they'd be pretty understandably upset about
| that, too.
|
| In general, "if I wanted my stuff on Bluesky, I would
| have put it there". It wasn't the bridge creator's
| decision to make.
| Repulsion9513 wrote:
| Public = consent for the public to see it. That includes
| the public on Bluesky. It was consensual. And the ruckus
| was in fact about Bluesky in particular. That's why the
| same project _already supported other protocols without a
| big ruckus_.
|
| In general, "I want my stuff on Bluesky but don't want to
| deal with cross-posting to multiple different platforms
| and keeping up with responses on all of them"
|
| And, "I want my stuff on whatever platform people want to
| read it on without having to individually approve each
| one" (which is quite literally the entire point of public
| posts on Mastodon).
|
| OH - and it wasn't the bridge creator's decision anyway;
| it was the decision of people on Bluesky to follow you
| that would trigger your posts to be federated, so...
| 15457345234 wrote:
| > Public = consent for the public to see it. That
| includes the public on Bluesky.
|
| What? No.
|
| If I put stuff on _my_ server you aren't automatically
| allowed to rehost it on _your_ server. Pretty much
| automatically a copyright violation in just about every
| viable jurisdiction.
|
| Basic stuff here
| Repulsion9513 wrote:
| When you share a public post on Mastodon, you are by
| implication licensing that content for redistribution.
| Because other Mastodon servers have to redistribute it in
| order for anyone on another instance to see it. Hope that
| helps you understand the basic stuff here.
|
| (Either that or every Mastodon server in existence is a
| massive copyright violation, which is frankly quite
| possible given how bad copyright law is)
| kstrauser wrote:
| It was meant for the public to see, not to bulk copy it
| en masse to somewhere else.
|
| Similarly, I don't want my blog posts used to train LLMs.
| I know they're likely to be since they're published right
| there on the Internet for anyone to see and read. But my
| _intent_ was for other humans to see and read them, not
| for someone to feed them into a regurgitator. There aren
| 't technical means that let me allow humans to read my
| stuff without allowing LLMs to ingest it, and someone
| could make the (bad) case that if I didn't want my work
| to be used to train an LLM, I shouldn't have made it
| public. Maybe. However, I reserve the right to think
| someone's an ass for doing it.
|
| Well, no technical hurdles kept the person from copying
| data out of the network people meant to post it to. It's
| probably not illegal. It's not a nice thing to do,
| though.
| Repulsion9513 wrote:
| > It was meant for the public to see, not to bulk copy it
| en masse to somewhere else.
|
| Except literally the entire design is for other Mastodon
| servers to bulk copy it en masse to somewhere else.
|
| > There aren't technical means that let me allow humans
| to read my stuff without allowing LLMs to ingest it
|
| Yes there are. Don't make it public.
|
| > However, I reserve the right to think someone's an ass
| for doing it.
|
| Of course! You can think anyone is an ass. You can think
| anything you want. That doesn't mean that person did
| anything wrong.
| rglullis wrote:
| > "if I wanted my stuff on Bluesky, I would have put it
| there"
|
| How about "If I wanted my stuff on the your Mastodon
| server, I would have put it there"?
|
| "If I wanted my Mastodon content on your RSS feed, I
| would have put it there".
|
| How about "If I wanted my stuff on the Internet, a
| publicly available internet, I would have put it there".
|
| This tribalism around network/brands/protocols is beyond
| stupid. The thing that is killing Twitter is its
| closedness and the assumption that the means of
| communication is what matters. It's not. Let open
| protocols be open.
|
| If people want privacy, then they should use a secure
| communication protocol and not a _social_ media network.
| ehPReth wrote:
| >If Google announced that they were going to ingest all
| Mastodon content and post it in a new Google Groups kind
| of thing, they'd be pretty understandably upset about
| that, too.
|
| exactly like they did with usenet without any issue?
| mulmen wrote:
| > Yes, the posts were publicly accessible, but the intent
| of posting to Mastodon isn't to have it show up
| automatically on another network.
|
| I thought that _was_ the point of activitypub.
| lolinder wrote:
| It would probably be worth clarifying in that repo what the
| license is for both the code in that repo and the code that
| it's actually running. It looks like it's just a very thin
| wrapper around @atproto/pds, which is MIT/Apache 2.0 [0], but
| the repo you link to has no license.
|
| Edit: now it has one! Thanks!
|
| [0] https://www.npmjs.com/package/@atproto/pds
| jakebsky wrote:
| Yup, it's MIT/Apache 2.0. We'll fix that. Thanks for the
| heads up.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Will this work for bare metal?
|
| I use BSD, and all I see is a installer for Debian/Ubuntu.
|
| No guide in sight for bare metal nor telling you what
| services/software are required.
| whyrusleeping wrote:
| yeah it works fine on bare metal, you'll just have to do a
| bit more set up work yourself (https terminating and such).
| The installer script should be instructive in how to run it
| but you'll have to figure out the BSD specific stuff
| mariusor wrote:
| Are there any independent projects implementing the AT
| protocol?
| jakebsky wrote:
| There are a number of independent projects using atproto in
| various ways.
|
| There's an (incomplete) list here:
| https://docs.bsky.app/showcase
|
| And the protocol is documented here: https://atproto.com
| mightyham wrote:
| I'm a little confused why the PDS server is both dockerized and
| has an installation exclusive to Ubuntu/Debian.
| jakebsky wrote:
| Yeah, there's nothing preventing someone from running the PDS
| server on other distributions. The installer just does a few
| convenient things for you (like install Docker, opens port
| 80/443 using ufw, etc) and we haven't added and tested
| support for other distributions.
|
| There is a Docker compose file in the repo, and advanced
| users shouldn't have any problems running the code on another
| distribution or even without Docker if they prefer.
|
| Advanced users can just view the installer script as
| documentation.
| xelamonster wrote:
| Why do you need to open ufw if it runs in Docker? Docker
| does its own routing magic and will happily blast right
| through any ufw rules.
|
| Very cool to see this available though, I might have to try
| it out later this week!
| mholt wrote:
| Awesome! Why did you choose Caddy as a proxy for PDS? (Caddy
| creator here.)
| jakebsky wrote:
| Thanks for Caddy, Matt! Some of us on the team have been
| using Caddy for years, for many of our projects. Because it's
| so simple, sufficiently high performance, and has lots of
| nice features.
|
| The on-demand TLS certificates with an "ask" endpoint is
| especially useful for the PDS use-case. Because there's
| generally a wildcard DNS name that is used to give each new
| user a domain handle (@alice.example.com) but we don't want
| to be vulnerable to a TLS certificate DoS/rate limit
| situation.
| mholt wrote:
| Great reasons -- glad to hear that! Let me know if you
| encounter any hiccups or have feedback.
|
| Love the fresh federated model btw!
| charcircuit wrote:
| Even if it may be simple in some areas, it doesn't handle
| edge cases such as
| https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/issues/1632 in other
| areas out of the box unlike other server software.
| myaccountonhn wrote:
| Hey! Congrats on the release.
|
| Does the AT Protocol only optimize for Twitter-like flows, or
| does it allow for other types of social applications to be
| built like Activitypub? For example a reddit-like social media.
| jakebsky wrote:
| Currently, atproto works probably best for public social
| apps, like microblogging, forums, etc. So yes, it's
| definitely possible to build a reddit-like social app on
| atproto.
|
| Part of the change today is that the PDS and Relay[1] now
| support non-app.bsky record types. This is quite new, so
| there could be issues, but we're prepared to fix any issues
| that crop up.
|
| 1. https://bsky.social/about/blog/5-5-2023-federation-
| architect...
| cabalamat wrote:
| > microblogging
|
| Would it be possible to use it for macroblogging, i.e. long
| posts with markdown markup, embedded images, etc? If so is
| there a python library tghat implements atproto?
| hnbad wrote:
| Hi. If the protocol is open, the software is free and the main
| instance openly federates with self-hosters, what's the
| monetization strategy here? Clearly it's not "harvest all the
| data and figure it out later" as that avenue seems to be shut
| down internationally by strengthened privacy laws and ads don't
| work well with federation and third party clients. Is "grow
| first, figure out how to make money later" still a viable
| strategy in this economy?
| riffic wrote:
| managed hosting perhaps? It works in the email industry at
| least (Google and Microsoft nearly dominate the email biz)
| hnbad wrote:
| Yeah but that assumes ATP reaches anything even remotely
| approximating the ubiquity of email rather than ending up
| like Google Wave (not literally by being handed off to
| Apache - which took Wave behind the barn in 2018 in case
| you're wondering what happened to it).
| paulgerhardt wrote:
| Unrelated to engineering but the recent rebrand to a dead
| butterfly logo[1][2][3] may be off brand for a platform wishing
| to communicate a more open, social Internet built on first
| principles and scientific rigor.
|
| [1]https://www.emilydamstra.com/please-enough-dead-butterflies/
|
| [2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14460013
|
| [3]https://bsky.social/about/blog/12-21-2023-butterfly
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Pedantic lepidopterists of the world, unite!
| Brendinooo wrote:
| This seems like what Berners-Lee's Solid project is trying to do,
| at least in principle. Is that correct?
|
| Seems intriguing regardless. Congrats on making it happen!
| wmf wrote:
| Solid is more generic than social media but yeah, it has a
| similar storage/app split as Bluesky.
| r14c wrote:
| I hope someone comes up with a multi-protocol social server.
| Bridges are a bad architecture for decentralized systems, because
| they introduce single points of failure. I can understand using a
| read-only bridge to mirror content from external resources, but
| if the other side speaks a federation protocol you should find a
| way to communicate directly so you don't have to worry about
| intermediary failures.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Someone has been working on a bridge between BlueSky and
| Mastodon, and uh, it has generated a TREMENDOUS amount of
| controversy on the Mastodon side.
|
| I have my own biases so I don't want to describe it further
| than that, nor link to it directly so as not to cause even more
| disagreement, but the controversy does not seem to faze the
| developer, so I believe you will have your wish.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| I know not the details, but all power to that developer.
| r14c wrote:
| A global bridge isn't a multi-protocol social server. The guy
| is free to do as he likes, but I'm saying I don't think
| public bridges like that are a good architectural decision
| for decentralized networks. The individual nodes should
| implement multi-protocol support instead.
| vidarh wrote:
| Some probably will, but I think a fairly substantial part
| of the Fediverse will ignore Bluesky other than via global
| bridges unless/until it has a lot of traction.
|
| I have two Mastodon instances, and I don't know if I'll
| bother. If I were to it'd be mostly because I feel that
| ideologically I think it'd benefit the Fediverse to embrace
| Bluesky real tight, take their best ideas, extend them, and
| ensure it feels like Bluesky is just another corner of the
| Fediverse with some pointless differences.
| r14c wrote:
| Just in practical terms, global bridges will see
| extremely high traffic if they become popular. I've
| watched people struggle to maintain operational bridges
| for single high-traffic channels. Not to mention the
| hosting cost of being a single point of failure for
| inter-network translation.
|
| I think the future of decentralized social media is
| bright. I'm critically supportive of all the work being
| done and I'll be happy as long as we don't repeat the
| mistakes of email and xmpp.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Can you at a high level explain why people are mad about
| this? Is there a difference in the sort of people on Bluesky
| vs Mastodon, or is it a technical disagreement?
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Again, please keep in mind that this is my perception of
| others' arguments, and so may have some bias. I am going to
| try and counteract that with my wording here, but maybe
| someone who holds this position can drop by and give their
| own summary.
|
| I have seen two main complaints:
|
| * This is opt-out not opt-in, and I don't like that.
|
| * BlueSky is bad because it is run by a company (sometimes
| with a suggestion that Jack Dorsey owns and runs the
| place), and I think the fediverse should be free from
| corporate influence, and so I object to the idea of a
| bridge.
| kstrauser wrote:
| In my experience, the former was the majority of the
| complaints. The common sentiment I saw boiled down to "if
| I wanted my posts to be on Bluesky, I'd have posted them
| there." I agree with that completely. It wasn't so much
| that it was Bluesky in particular, as that someone made
| an opt-out system that would re-publish all their content
| elsewhere.
| vidarh wrote:
| People don't like the perception that someone is doing
| something to their posts without them opting in.
|
| Mastodon is very sensitive to that.
|
| People will still bridge the two in various ways.
|
| People will also bolt on more direct bridging to Mastodon
| if there's any demand from Bluesky users.
|
| Basically, unless Bluesky totally fails, it will be
| embraced and extended by the broader broader Fediverse,
| because why not?
| rakoo wrote:
| That's Friendica. Bluesky apparently will be available in next
| release
| r14c wrote:
| Friendica is always doing the good work.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Every time Bluesky comes up as a topic on Mastodon, the
| discussion becomes a total shitshow. I think most people are
| just going to be happier if the two stay separate.
|
| This post immediately comes to mind:
| https://bsky.app/profile/caseynewton.bsky.social/post/3kktr3...
| dotnet00 wrote:
| In general, most of mastodon is too cliquey and over-dramatic
| to tolerate any sort of bridging. I see so many reports on
| block trackers of various kinds of bridging daily. Back when
| Threads had just been announced and merely mentioned eventually
| bridging with ActivityPub, the tracker was flooded with
| preemptive blocks of the domain.
| vidarh wrote:
| And yet you can be on Mastodon and just never bother to pay
| attention to any of that drama and your life will barely be
| affected by it.
|
| The cliques are mostly important to those who choose to make
| it important for themselves.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Yeah, that's what I do, was just pointing out that the
| loudest mastodon users are like.
| jamietanna wrote:
| Yup, https://fed.brid.gy is one such project, and as another
| commenter mentions there's been a lot of discussion over the
| last couple of weeks. Some very good discussion, some
| interesting points, and a bit of unfair venting, but looks like
| it's moving in a good direction
| r14c wrote:
| Global bridges like this are single points of failure that
| defeat the purpose of decentralization. I'm saying that
| individual nodes should be full participants on all of the
| networks they want to communicate with. I don't have an issue
| with whatever they're trying to accomplish, but I've seen how
| hard it is to maintain stable high-traffic bridges.
| UseofWeapons1 wrote:
| This looks pretty compelling! The best of controlling your own
| data and a global, network-effects-compatible content approach.
| Seems like a win for users if it gets adopted.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| I am very excited that this shipped! I believed the team would
| pull it off, but there's been a lot of skepticism, some
| justified, some unjustified, IMHO. Hopefully this will assuage
| some people's concerns.
|
| I am unsure if I am going to run my own just yet. We'll see.
| jakebsky wrote:
| Thanks Steve! You've been very fair the entire time and your
| feedback/thoughts have been helpful.
| tamimio wrote:
| >You need to join Discord to access the feature
|
| Seriously?! Will this trend ever dies?!
|
| I don't want to use discord, can't they just make a simple
| request form? Whenever I see "join our discord" for anything in
| any service I just never use that service, keep it as an option
| for whoever wants to hangout there just don't make it the "only"
| channel of communication!
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Is that a direct quote? I don't see it anywhere. What I do see
| is
|
| > Because the PDS distribution is not totally settled, we want
| to have a line of communication with PDS admins in the network,
| so we're asking any developer that plans to run a PDS to join
| the PDS Admins Discord.
|
| https://docs.bsky.app/blog/self-host-federation
|
| This is much more reasonable than an actual gate on the
| feature.
| tamimio wrote:
| Not a direct quote. But Discord is the only means of
| communication.
| jakebsky wrote:
| This is just for a brief period during polishing/debugging
| since this is the first time third-party PDS hosts have been
| added to the network.
|
| The goal is just to help PDS operators join the network and
| make sure that if there's a problem we have a channel of
| communication open.
| tamimio wrote:
| Bluesky has a Matrix dev group (afaik it's an official one)
| why not use that too in addition to Discord (or other comms
| channels)?
| Arathorn wrote:
| Unfortunately they declared they didn't have moderation
| bandwidth to maintain it as an official channel, and then
| apparently moved to Discord :(
| tamimio wrote:
| Welp, that's unfortunate indeed.
|
| P.S. Fantastic project (Matrix/Element)!
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I'm a little confused by this, how did switching to
| Discord reduce the load on their moderators?
| Arathorn wrote:
| i assume it didn't. unfortunately, decentralised web
| projects don't always do that well at having each others'
| backs. (Matrix maintains a presence on Bluesky tho:
| https://bsky.app/profile/matrix.org)
| charcircuit wrote:
| Discord has better moderation tools than matrix
| djbusby wrote:
| Maybe some kind of federated option?
| emllnd wrote:
| What would you like to see instead for groupchat-style quick
| low-threshold discussion?
| wmf wrote:
| Maybe Zulip.
| colesantiago wrote:
| This is good and all but, sigh are we really celebrating letting
| self hosting get into the hands of bad actors to federate with
| Bluesky?
|
| And don't say "lets defederate with said bad actors" since they
| would still exist and anyone can join said bad actors instances.
|
| It's akin to telling antelopes surrounded by lions to close their
| eyes and the lions are 'gone' yet the lions still exist around
| them.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| Your argument against federation and open communication is that
| bad people might use it? What's to stop bad people from using
| the main Bluesky instance?
| colesantiago wrote:
| There is a form of moderation on the main instance.
|
| A self hosted instance will have no such moderation.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| > A self hosted instance will have no such moderation.
|
| Maybe I'm missing something here. Are the federated
| instances less functional than the main instance? Is this
| some kind of weird freemium thing they're doing? (I'm
| actually asking, I'm not familiar with Bluesky much at
| all.)
| steveklabnik wrote:
| I have not yet reviewed the code, but the federated
| instances should be equally as functional as the main
| instance. However, having the option of functionality
| does not mean that they will operate the same way.
|
| Your parent is not making a technical claim, but a social
| one: that there will be instances that are effectively
| unmoderated, because the people who run it hold that up
| as some kind of ideal, and that that is a problem.
|
| I do not share this opinion personally, but have seen
| many people express it, so I feel like I am representing
| it accurately.
|
| In fact, I would go so far as to say that it's incorrect,
| and not just an opinion, because unlike in Mastodon,
| moderation is not tied to your instance. Of course,
| whoever owns an instance can decide to kick someone off
| of it, but that's not the primary moderation mechanism in
| BlueSky, which allows you to choose your own set of
| moderation tools, regardless of which instance you or
| anyone else belongs to. I linked to the main three posts
| to understand BlueSky's moderation stances and features
| upthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39471973
| orthecreedence wrote:
| > Your parent is not making a technical claim, but a
| social one: that there will be instances that are
| effectively unmoderated, because the people who run it
| hold that up as some kind of ideal, and that that is a
| problem.
|
| Ah that makes sense. Thanks for reframing this. I don't
| particularly agree either, but I think I now understand
| the viewpoint better.
| shkkmo wrote:
| A self hosted instance will have whatever moderation the
| host chooses to implement (such as CSAM monitoring if
| required by law.)
|
| On top of that, user defined moderation will be applied
| from block and mute lists. Hopefully this will include
| using 3rd party lists and eventually, user specified
| content filters.
| numpad0 wrote:
| It's always porn, or political extremism. Nobody opposes
| literal spams, but the definition of former two depends on
| cultural backgrounds and there will always be demonization
| around those.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > And don't say "lets defederate with said bad actors" since
| they would still exist and anyone can join said bad actors
| instances.
|
| Er... fine, and who cares? If everyone defederates (slightly
| more a nuclear option on Bluesky than Mastodon but still I
| think possible?), then, well, the bad instance is its own
| problem.
|
| Or are you saying that even an unfederated instance with bad
| people would be bad? Like, the only solution there is to ban
| all open-source social networking software.
| shkkmo wrote:
| This is entirely by design:
|
| > Moderation on Bluesky is not tied to your server, like it is
| on Mastodon. Defederation, a way of addressing moderation
| issues in Mastodon by disconnecting servers, is not as relevant
| on Bluesky because there are other layers to the system. Server
| operators can set rules for what content they will host, but
| tools like blocklists and moderation services are what help
| communities self-organize around moderation preferences. We've
| already integrated block and mute lists, and the tooling for
| independent moderation services is coming soon.
|
| The whole point is to decentralize moderation so that users
| aren't stuck with only the moderation provided by their host.
|
| Decentralized moderation and the tools needed to support it are
| not solved problems but are instead ongoing projects. Block and
| mute lists clearly won't be sufficient to enable robust
| decentralized moderation so it will he interesting to see how
| support for third party content filters get implemented.
| emceestork wrote:
| I switched to Bluesky but then moved back to twitter. I'm glad
| that they are trying to compete with Twitter (Twitter is a
| conservative cesspool), but all of my non-technical friends have
| stayed on Twitter. So, I end up going where they are.
|
| I think the reason my friends did not join Bluesky despite me
| inviting them is that it just isn't as good of a product as
| Twitter. You can't post videos or DM.
|
| I am not a tech executive and have no idea about corporate
| strategy, but it seems like Bluesky should focus less on
| technical differentiators and more on building killer features
| that have mass appeal and a community that people want to join.
|
| IMHO this milestone, while cool, means absolutely nothing to
| people outside of the hacker news crowd.
|
| I'm rooting for Bluesky, but it seems to me it will die without a
| critical mass of users.
|
| Again, I'm kinda dumb, so this may all be wrong.
| pfraze wrote:
| It's a fair point and we definitely debated it, but it was too
| important to us that we complete the mission.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Debated videos and DM? Mastodon has those features; if you're
| not doing them at all you may want to reconsider.
| pfraze wrote:
| Debated prioritizing them before federation, not debated
| their existence. They are a must-have for social.
| danabramov wrote:
| We definitely want to implement these features, the
| question was whether they should hold back releasing
| support for federation or not. Since federation is a core
| constraint on any features we'd like to build, the team
| felt that there is no reason to hold federation back, and
| that releasing it as it's ready makes sense.
|
| We're thinking about Bluesky as both a product _and_ a
| protocol (informing each other 's design), and you're 100%
| right that for the end user, the product itself is what
| matters. Because we've taken on the decentralization
| constraint, we take longer to "catch up" to features that
| centralized platforms tend to have from the start, but it's
| definitely going to be a major area of focus for us going
| forward. (Ofc Mastodon isn't centralized, but note that
| it's had a few years of head start on feature development.
| We'll get there.)
| pr337h4m wrote:
| Mastodon DMs have absolutely no privacy:
| https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/18079
|
| For a decentralized protocol doing things right is much
| more important than doing things fast, it is very difficult
| (and in a lot of cases impossible) to break backwards
| compatibility.
| Repulsion9513 wrote:
| DMs on any other service also have no privacy. Signal or
| Telegram could read your DMs by simply releasing an
| update to their code, for example. You always have to
| trust the person running the service you use. (Unless you
| have E2EE/something like OTR, in which case you have to
| trust the persom who makes that code!)
| pr337h4m wrote:
| The whole point of end-to-end encryption is that you
| don't have to trust the people running the service you
| use.
|
| If Signal releases a malicious update (and they don't
| provide reproducible builds), it is very much possible
| for you to know about it, as everything is on your
| device. Even if the binaries are different from the
| source code, decompilers, analyzing network traffic, etc.
| gives the community a good chance at catching malicious
| updates. Mastodon admins can simply pull up your
| plaintext DMs on their servers and no one will ever know.
| Repulsion9513 wrote:
| > The whole point of end-to-end encryption is that you
| don't have to trust the people running the service you
| use.
|
| Well then I guess it's pointless because it doesn't
| accomplish that.
|
| (The actual point, FYI, is that you don't have to trust
| all of: them, their hosting providers, your ISP, the ISPs
| between, the government, and their mom.)
|
| > it is very much possible for you to know about it
|
| "Possible" != "done"
|
| > analyzing network traffic
|
| How are you gonna do that? Surely if they wanted to sniff
| it would still just look like any other encrypted data
|
| > gives the community a good chance at catching malicious
| updates
|
| Sure, when the same application is used by everyone,
| which is not true in either the Mastodon world or the new
| Bluesky-small-instances world
| emceestork wrote:
| Ah yeah, I get that. I don't mean to be cynical on the day
| you complete that mission.
|
| Congrats on launching! Excited to see what y'all do next.
| kunalgupta wrote:
| this is the correct order of operations for sure
| DevX101 wrote:
| You guys made the right call. You're not trying to become the
| next TikTok.
| elpool2 wrote:
| I think everything you said was fair, but you also mentioned
| Twitter being a conservative cesspool, and a lot these features
| like federation and composable moderation are designed to help
| prevent the whole "rich guy buys the company and turns it into
| something you don't like" scenario.
| phone8675309 wrote:
| Federation is nice but when the platform only does one-third
| of what the platform you're trying to leave does then the
| whole thing feels like a toy
| t_mann wrote:
| Not sure I agree. Being the thing that the tech folks find cool
| isn't a bad starting position at all. And it's significantly
| harder to achieve than DM's.
| 303uru wrote:
| I've been using Bluesky for a week and I'm impressed. I
| actually appreciate that there is less media, it's more about
| conversation. So far it feels very much like Twitter before it
| became a cesspool. I'm conversing with local journalists,
| prominent scientists, sci-fi authors, etc... It's wonderful.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| > Twitter is a conservative cesspool
|
| I disagree. If anything now it's more balanced, every "right of
| Portland-liberal" is no longer hidden and shadow-banned or
| worse. I like it a lot more!
|
| Now you can actually read and learn about stuff you care about.
| emceestork wrote:
| Yeah, maybe we just have different politics and I'm too
| dismissive of alternative worldviews.
|
| Still though, I get like Matt Gaetz' tweets recommended to
| me. Does anyone like that dude? How is this happening? Why on
| earth would I want that? I feel like all this conservative
| stuff is surfaced by the application to me.
|
| [Proof](https://ibb.co/ypHS8fN)
|
| I got notifications, on my dang phone, for the dumbest
| fucking takes. I don't get them for liberal people. Possible
| I am just in the demographic of people they think would swing
| conservative so they target me.
| MaxHoppersGhost wrote:
| This is funny to read since this is basically what
| conservatives experienced for the last ten years on Twitter
| pre-Elon.
| kouru225 wrote:
| Navalny's wife was just banned and then shadow banned. There
| are countless examples of leftist accounts getting banned
| just for being critical about Musk.
|
| It's absolutely conservative cesspool. Nazis can are
| literally posting 14 words propaganda all day long and there
| are no consequences.
| bl_valance wrote:
| I agree. I now see both extremes(horseshoe) and in-between as
| much. While before it was heavily leaned towards the left.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > Twitter is a conservative cesspool
|
| That.. that is the exact _opposite_ of the problem with
| Twitter. As Jeremy Clarkson put it years ago: "Twitter is
| where left wing people go to share their increasingly left wing
| views". The worst of them jumped ship for Mastodon (and it's
| why I'll never, ever use Mastodon) but it's still very far from
| some kind of conservative haven.
| hathawsh wrote:
| That _was_ the problem with Twitter /X. It appears that
| Elon's tweaking has caused the service to switch from left-
| leaning to right-leaning.
|
| https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/05/01/after-
| mus...
| packetlost wrote:
| That study is based on user sentiment/survey, so I wouldn't
| really put any stock in to be completely honest. The only
| thing this study tells me is there was a change relative to
| some baseline, not that there was any sort of absolute
| lean.
| hathawsh wrote:
| Fair enough. Personally, I like to watch both sides, and
| it has been interesting to see conservatives becoming
| more favorable toward Twitter/X. If I were working on a
| social network (like Bluesky, the topic of this
| discussion), I would be watching Twitter/X closely right
| now to try to understand the effects that certain tweaks
| (such as moderation policy) may have.
| packetlost wrote:
| Agreed! My own gut feeling is that it leaned pretty
| heavily left and it's now closer to center than ever, and
| people are noticing the _delta_.
|
| Every time I open BlueSky it's like 50% Liberal rage-bait
| and like 40% people posting mostly about their sexual and
| gender identities.
| djur wrote:
| The posts you see on Bluesky by default are the posts
| made by people you follow. There are other options to
| select whichever feeds you prefer. If you're seeing a lot
| of that content, it's because you're following people who
| post a lot of that stuff.
| packetlost wrote:
| This is not on my following feed, it's on discover.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| To be honest, I think Twitter (and other similar sites)
| are a huge negative for society no matter who dominates
| the echo chamber. Training everyone to dump 140-char hot
| takes as a dominant form of "discourse" has been a
| genuine evil for the world. Twitter delenda est.
| robin_reala wrote:
| 280 since 2017.
| adra wrote:
| There's no absolute lean at all it's all subjective, and
| sadly multidimensional which is hard for normal people to
| appreciate, so sure.
|
| Soooo.. Right and left are objective bars in the sand and
| my options are perfectly formed and happen to be exactly
| just on the correct side of all issues.
| packetlost wrote:
| > There's no absolute lean at all it's all subjective,
| and sadly multidimensional which is hard for normal
| people to appreciate, so sure.
|
| I guess "absolute" is the wrong word. Lean isn't really a
| measurable thing, which is sorta my point. The GP claimed
| that there was, my claim was that all we have are
| people's _feelings_ , and people don't feel in absolute
| terms, they just notice when there's a change so the
| linked data on peoples feelings probably doesn't support
| the claim.
| Repulsion9513 wrote:
| Whereas the GP comment was based on... an anecdote from a
| celebrity. Definitely more trustworthy. Yep.
| babypuncher wrote:
| Pretty hard right-leaning too. They regularly ban left-
| leaning journalists who are critical of Musk, while letting
| actual neo-Nazis roam free. They over-corrected to an
| extreme degree. I still can't believe they banned Alexei
| Navalny's wife after Putin murdered him. And I find it
| sickening that there are people here who _defend_ that
| shit.
| hellojesus wrote:
| Doesn't Twitter like most socials feed you things with which
| they predict would increase your engagement or time on
| platform?
|
| If the GP's social circle leaned more conservative than them,
| it may just be bad predictions. And I can see how that would
| degrade user experience.
|
| I often hear things like X service skews left/right and find
| it odd that people can have such differing experiences. Hence
| my belief that the feed algos are primarily the issue. People
| do like confirmation of biases.
| basil-rash wrote:
| When somebody else is _wrong on the internet_ , one feels
| compelled to comment and explain one's righteousness, or at
| the very least read through the comments to see if somebody
| else already has. Thus algorithms that optimize engagement
| (most of them) are most likely to show you stuff you
| disagree with.
|
| The antidote is Linkedinification: "Thanks for bringing up
| this point it's really smart and I fully agree!"
| hellojesus wrote:
| Understood. But if you, as a company, realize you're
| losing users because everything you show is rage bait,
| maybe adjustments are made.
|
| Or your point stands and helps to describe why the non
| conservative GGP was of the belief that X is conservative
| leaning.
| djur wrote:
| Twitter has a lot of very right-wing posters and a lot of
| very left-wing posters. Which of these you're likely to see
| as a huge problem and which you're likely to dismiss as a few
| insignificant goofballs is probably going to be based on your
| own political orientation. It would be surprising if there
| hasn't been a rightward shift, though, considering that
| causing such was one of the current owner's explicit goals. I
| don't think it's unreasonable for people to perceive Twitter
| as favoring the political right when the owner is actively
| doing so.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I'm certainly willing to believe that there's been a shift.
| But it's completely implausible that in just a year (two? I
| forget how long it's been) since the sale, Twitter has
| transformed into a "conservative cesspool". What the poster
| I replied to is almost certainly seeing is that there's
| actual balance now, instead of being absurdly hard left
| like it was before.
| Repulsion9513 wrote:
| It has never been "absurdly hard left". It was
| representative of the communities that used it (many of
| whom have been chased off by Musk).
| vidarh wrote:
| That's funny given the number of people explicitly expressing
| support for fascism I've blocked on my Twitter account over
| the last week.
| GordonS wrote:
| I think the reality is that it's a mix - but people tend to
| follow others with similar views.
| timeon wrote:
| Not sure what your point is. `Left` and `conservative` are
| not mutually exclusive things. Why are you juxtaposing them
| here?
| mvdtnz wrote:
| No video in 2024 is a total deal breaker for most users. That's
| insane.
| eropple wrote:
| Video is also prohibitively expensive outside of Google-scale
| endeavors and will likely crush both third-party BGSes and
| PDSes. Everyone doing video is either selling you ads
| (whether it's in that video or around it), selling you the
| video itself, or is losing money. Possibly all three.
|
| As it is, og-embeds do work for video and audio from a few
| different providers.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Great. But without video you lose most of your users.
| sfink wrote:
| I am increasingly of the mind that this is a feature, not
| a bug.
|
| If you want to be Twitter, you'll end up being Twitter.
| We already have one of those, it sucks, and we don't need
| another one.
|
| Social networks go to crap above a certain scale. If
| everyone can see your posts, you'll write posts to be
| seen by everyone. Which, as it turns out, ends up
| benefiting no one. The magic comes when there is a
| community, where you give a shit about the people you're
| sending messages to, and they give a shit about you. If
| the community is too small, then nobody bothers with it
| and it dies. If the community is too large, then it ends
| up being old men screaming at clouds, and (see above) we
| already have one of those. So a platform that is good
| enough to use, but limits the number of disaffected
| members, is the only thing worth creating.
|
| If something I'm saying requires a video, then I can
| always link to one. If something someone else is saying
| requires a video, and it requires the video to be
| immediately visible while I'm reading whatever they're
| saying, then there's a good chance I'm better off not
| seeing it anyway, even if I think I want to.
|
| (Ironically, in this post I _am_ an old man screaming at
| clouds...)
| wmf wrote:
| That gives me a great idea: If you self-host your PDS you
| can have video but moochers don't get it.
| Choco31415 wrote:
| If storage is a problem, couldn't Blusky add a size limit
| to video uploads?
| eropple wrote:
| It's not storage, it's bandwidth. Most system providers,
| for Bad Reasons, charge a lot for egress; even relatively
| good ones like Cloudflare have particular payment
| shenanigans around video. Size uploads could help in that
| situation, but it's a bandaid on a bullet wound when the
| video still gets played a million times, y'know?
| omoikane wrote:
| Feature requests opened since 2023-07-24:
|
| GIF support: https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-
| app/issues/1047
|
| Audio/video support: https://github.com/bluesky-
| social/social-app/issues/1052
| edgarvaldes wrote:
| > Twitter is a conservative cesspool
|
| Interesting. I see it as the de-facto journalist platform,
| which to me (as a non american) make it very left leaning. But
| then again, I don't use X.
| myko wrote:
| American journalism isn't left-leaning. At best it is "click"
| leaning, and say what they need to do to get eyeballs on
| their content. This is why they helped normalize trump so
| hard, and repeatedly fail to call out the extremist right
| wing in the US.
| hnbad wrote:
| This is what a lot of people don't get about the "pop
| feminism" era of online "journalism" in the pre-Trump era:
| it wasn't feminism, it was clickbait. At best it sold an
| idea of feminism but the emphasis was always on the selling
| part and not anything ideological. "Girlboss feminism"
| helps no-one except the bosses.
|
| The same is true about most so-called "left-wing"
| journalism. Some journalists may be true believers but the
| platforms exist to make money, not to be any threat to the
| systems those ideologies explicitly oppose.
|
| Heck, this even goes for political parties like the
| Democrats: the Texas governor literally rejected the
| authority of the federal government and legislative system
| by deploying his military at the border and the Democrat
| president's response was to propose a bill that would have
| created a legal avenue for what the treasonous governor was
| trying to make happen. Decorum is used as an excuse to keep
| intentionally ceding ground to the supposed political
| enemy.
| belkinpower wrote:
| It was. In the last year it's become largely conservative,
| and not in a standard reasonable small-government, etc. way.
| It's like reading Facebook posts from your dumbest uncle.
| lazzlazzlazz wrote:
| I'm not sure what kind of "cesspool" Bluesky is, but it's
| unbearable. It's like 2015-era Tumblr but worse, somehow.
| Twitter, by contrast, feels like a breath of fresh air.
| hnbad wrote:
| I'm wondering if you really mean "2015-era Tumblr" or are
| trying to evoke pre-Trump liberals on Tumblr (i.e.
| "manspreading is a micro aggression" pop feminism and
| teenagers creating fan lore about gender identities) by
| referring to it as that.
|
| If anything, my experience of Bluesky has been the
| inoffensive vapid thought leadering of peak Twitter alongside
| the playful air-headed liberal self-help that is also fairly
| reminiscent of peak Twitter. In one word: bland. Being able
| to paint over the offensive things like nazis and porn by
| sweeping them under your personal rug rather than blocking or
| banning them only adds to this impression for me.
|
| Twitter, your breath of fresh air, on the other hand is
| overrun by ChatGPT spam bots and shovelware drop shipping ads
| worse than the crypto "giveaway" scams and paid tweets of the
| immediate pre-Musk days and every even moderately left-
| leaning political tweet is filled with replies describing the
| violent acts they want to do to that person in excessive
| detail by accounts that openly post literal neo-nazi
| propaganda videos of Adolf Hitler denouncing "degenerate art"
| as a Jewish plot to weaken the German volk and national
| spirit and going "I don't agree with everything he did but he
| had a point". Political discussions about the Middle East in
| turn are split evenly between right wing calls for genocide
| of all adults and children in Palestine and right wing
| defenses of Palestinians for being victims of the
| international Jewish conspiracy to exterminate the white race
| through mixed breeding with brown refugees.
|
| We used to always call Twitter "the bad place", "hellsite" or
| "cesspool" before Musk but it certainly deserves those names
| now more than ever, arguably rivaling 4chan in its political
| takes although the depictions of gore are mostly limited to
| uncensored war footage and the porn is decidedly more tame.
|
| The reason Twitter is called a "right-wing cesspool" is not
| because it's full of right-wing people (that would just make
| it a "pool"), it's because of the vicious explicit threats of
| violence and celebration of human suffering propagated by
| those people. For all its faults, the bland libs on Bluesky
| don't do much of that.
|
| Granted, my experience of Twitter might be tainted by the
| fact most people I used to follow in the old days have either
| left or are no longer active and any time I visit the
| algorithmic timeline hits me at full blast. And a lot of the
| edgier posts (not replies) by right wing folks the avalanche
| of drama RTs throw my way are clearly created to farm
| engagement in the hope of striking it big if the bluecheck
| authors make the payout lottery.
| dustedcodes wrote:
| > Twitter is a conservative cesspool
|
| We are all born liberal and die conservative, the only
| difference is how soon in our lifetimes did each of us wisen
| up.
| troad wrote:
| Demonstrably false - elder hippies are a hoot.
|
| But more importantly, a bit rich for someone still caught up
| in the left-right dichotomy to be telling others to wise up.
| Some of us have ideals, good sir / ma'am.
| heroprotagonist wrote:
| I looked at the site and I see a lot of comparisons to 'old
| social'. But for people who might run their own node or decide to
| commit to the network and encourage their friends to join them,
| it seems your true major competitor would be projects like
| mastodon.
|
| Yet there are no comparisons on the site. I don't see even see a
| mention. This makes it difficult to evaluate relative maturity,
| core competencies, limitations, and risks.
| danabramov wrote:
| The linked blog post includes a section called "Does this mean
| Bluesky is going to be like Mastodon?" which lists a few
| differences. Is there something in addition that would be worth
| clarifying? I agree it would be great to include that on the
| site and not just on the post.
| heroprotagonist wrote:
| Thanks for pointing that out! I read again and see the blog
| post has a summary with 4 very high level points, which I
| admit I didn't read initially. I saw a wall of text about an
| expansion and I was still asking myself 'What exactly is
| Bluesky and how is it different?', so I skipped right to the
| main site.
|
| Having read the post more deeply, particularly the bullet
| points you mentioned, it looks like there are four really
| high level differentiators listed:
|
| * A focus on the global conversation
|
| * Composable moderation
|
| * Composable feeds
|
| * Account portability
|
| The term 'composable' seems almost misused when reading the
| extended descriptions, and is used differently between
| points. For example, 'composable moderation' indicates that
| moderation isn't done on a per-server level.
|
| The fundamental censorship and algorithmic prioritization
| models for distributed social networks seems to have three
| layers: global (centralized), server, user.
|
| In 'old social' the model is basically just 'global', as
| there are no servers and the only 'user-level' options are
| those determined by the global operator.
|
| It doesn't seem like moderation would truly be 'composable'
| if it's only set on the global and user (and therefore global
| via centralized determination of client-level specs) level.
| It sounds like Facebook except with other people paying the
| data costs.
|
| The next bullet indicates 'composable feeds', which sound
| like a very nice feature but really don't seem to follow a
| decentralized model either. The 'composition' does not
| combine from each global/server/user layer. They sound more
| like 'custom feeds' which users can define based on global
| content, using predefined criteria determined by a client
| (web app) which don't really a way to control the behavior
| of. Which makes this feature only truly operate on the global
| layer, and 'custom' rather than 'composable'.
|
| It would be on the same level of 'old social' adding a new
| feature to their web app, more than a fundamental transfer of
| control to the network. As a result, when the dollars dry up
| and the feature isn't financially plausible, or a PM
| somewhere makes a bad decision because he read a blog post
| about how great it is to destroy user choice, there's risk
| the feature could go away.
|
| Anyway, the question I'm still left with in the end is this.
| If moderation is done globally, and I can't exercise any
| control over the prioritization of content beyond what is
| granted to me by the global provider (even though there are
| more and better choices than 'old social'), what's the
| benefit of running a federated node?
|
| I don't mean to make it sound like this is some kind of
| Twitter clone with an SSO login that outsources operational
| costs to volunteers while still keeping a fundamentally iron
| grip on control. I'm just honestly confused at the value
| proposition for volunteers. Exactly how much control is
| transferred to the network beyond simply hosting data which
| is displayed according to how the centralized portion of the
| system determines?
|
| It'd be good if the trade-off in terms of time, data, and
| performance for running your own node was simply to remove
| the capability of the centralized network to collect user
| behavioral metrics and such. That's a great and valid reason
| to host your own service or use a trusted party's service.
| But there's no mention of this if it is the case. If you
| provide that already without promoting the fact, maybe bring
| that up with your marketing team.
|
| Anyway that's getting a bit off topic. But to the original
| point:
|
| Ideally, a better comparison would be a dedicated page which
| coallates every feature of each platform in a grid. A row for
| each feature. Row cells would fill with 'has' or 'does not
| have' checkboxes or possibly text where there's something
| similar but differs sufficiently to require an explanation.
| Maybe with links to documentation or direct to UI on the line
| items where appropriate.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > If moderation is done globally, and I can't exercise any
| control over the prioritization of content beyond what is
| granted to me by the global provider (even though there are
| more and better choices than 'old social'), what's the
| benefit of running a federated node?
|
| Running your own server (aka PDS) allows you to post
| content that might be blocked on other servers.
|
| The "global" moderation in BlueSky is also federated.
| Anyone can provide a weighted feed, search engine or other
| content discovery service (aka AppView) by crawling servers
| or other indexers (aka Relay). This is like what
| google/bing/ddg does for webpages.
|
| The user can then apply their own moderation to the results
| returned by the aggretator/indexer of their choice. This
| like running an add blocker.
| fiatjaf wrote:
| You have nailed it. Bluesky weirdly tries to omit that as
| much as they can, but they do admit in their protocol
| descriptions that everything goes through and depends on a
| central server with absolute power.
|
| They also mention that anyone can run another of these, but
| there is zero chance anyone will be able to do that.
| numpad0 wrote:
| I think the composable part comes from some internally
| recognized and more specific operational needs. There are
| multiple overlapping and sometimes offending legal
| requirements for free speeches and its limits, let alone
| ethical ones, on this planet.
|
| e.g. Call for democracy can be highly illegal in some
| regions(no, not just in China, or just few countries that
| are "super backwards"). Some may wish to say that those
| regions are objectively wrong and deserve no attentions,
| those who ingest such content should fight to death for
| that speech, or something heroic along that. It's not that
| simple and easy, and in those cases a "zero tolerance on
| criticisms for social systems" filter might be useful in
| letting user in for what is worthwhile without asking for
| their lives nor blood on our hands.
|
| btw, if only it was always something that heroic. Mastodon
| Fediverse exploded and sheared into camps of censored loli,
| uncensored furry, alt-right terrorism, and myriad rest of
| none-of-it isolates, all slowly declining. A global unified
| federated microblogging network that was almost completed,
| over that.
| danabramov wrote:
| _> sound more like 'custom feeds' which users can define
| based on global content, using predefined criteria
| determined by a client (web app) which don't really a way
| to control the behavior of. Which makes this feature only
| truly operate on the global layer, and 'custom' rather than
| 'composable'._
|
| To be clear, custom feeds aren't defined in the client app.
| Anyone can run a custom feed on their own server and with
| arbitrary logic. A custom feed subscribes to a global
| firehose (which could also be run by a third party) and
| uses the stream of the events in the network to produce its
| results. A user can then publish such a feed under their
| account, and other users can consume it. This is
| essentially event sourcing.
|
| Here's a technical paper with details:
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.03239.pdf
|
| We'll have more to share on composable moderation in near
| future.
| clot27 wrote:
| C'mon ya'll just use AP?
| steveklabnik wrote:
| I am not interested in Mastodon and interested in Bluesky
| partially due to the differences in protocol. "just use AP"
| isn't interesting. This is.
|
| (To me! others feel the exact opposite. Diversity is good
| here.)
| rvz wrote:
| Given that there are some so-called Twitter / X alternatives and
| options to choose from like Threads, Mastodon and Bluesky and are
| now open for registration, we can now see which platform the most
| users will choose to go to if a major destructive change happens
| on X.
|
| Once that happens we now wait for the platform that has the most
| sign ups.
| threeseed wrote:
| It's no longer just about Twitter.
|
| Meta yesterday integrated Threads with Facebook allowing you to
| cross post and almost every week they are deepening the
| integration with Instagram.
|
| They are clearly trying to broaden the user base to include the
| other few billion who never signed up for Twitter.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Bluesky is starting to look like an elaborate reboot of Mastodon
| with a fancy username redirect, but I'm guessing its technical
| aspects, while those are series of great achievements, were not
| the crucial part to its success so far; the part that worked was
| community building.
|
| Nostr worked to some extent despite existence of Mastodon because
| Mastodon bodged that part. Mastodon took off because Twitter
| broke its community. Bluesky's successes is really making me feel
| that the first S of the abbreviation S.N.S. do stand for what it
| stands.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| > Bluesky's successes is really making me feel that the first S
| of the abbreviation S.N.S. do stand for what it stands.
|
| There's _tons_ of alternate social media out there. Forums,
| Subreddits, Tildes, Discourse, Matrix, IRC, Mastodon, Lemmy,
| Usenet, and on and on. The truth is the S in SNS is always what
| social networks have been about.
| numpad0 wrote:
| And a lot of them failed for their technical shortcomings and
| many others from social aspects.
|
| IRC failed in technical side due to the failure in committee
| development model around IRCv3, Reddit succeeded by sole
| social factor despite being a carbon copy of Digg. To me,
| Bluesky vs Mastodon, and also Twitter vs Mastodon situations
| seems closer to the latter, even with controversial waitlist
| and the big turmoil, respectively.
| yborg wrote:
| >used for 30+ years = failed
|
| I don't understand why so many technical people equate
| monopoly with success. I use IRC every day.
| numpad0 wrote:
| I hate Electronification, WebNonsensification,
| Discordification, ... as much as the next guy, but median
| user age incrementing every year for past 10+ years ->
| fail to me.
| mech422 wrote:
| Me as well...
|
| I actually like that IRC is less 'noisey' then most
| social media (I generally only hang on a few low volume
| channels) with no 'feed' being shoved at me, no algorithm
| deciding what I 'should' see. I bop into more popular
| channels as needed, but for general use, I find the self-
| directed nature of IRC to be the 'perfect social media'
| for me...eg I see only what I'm interested in.
| scudsworth wrote:
| https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/discussions/1157#d...
| fsflover wrote:
| Without JavaScript there is no text but only the footer. Quite
| weird.
| senkora wrote:
| Somewhat unrelated, but I appreciate the existence of the public
| firehose endpoint at https://firesky.tv and
| wss://firesky.tv/ws/app
|
| It's roughly 10 posts/second, so it's trivial to process it
| completely locally.
| lordswork wrote:
| Bluesky has the technology, now it just needs the network, which
| is the hard part.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| This I applaud as the tech in me.
|
| It will quickly become a mess in the real world.
|
| People will run pods on cheapest VPS and they will get hacked,
| run out of money, get bored, go broke etc.
|
| Imagine as fractions of content goes missing for a while or is
| just deleted.
|
| One guy runs a small pod with some people, kills it, 60.000
| messages gone. How does that impact interconnected discussions?
|
| If I own my own data. (good), and I can remove my data if I want
| (good). Then what happened to a BlueSky conversation I was having
| with 40 other people? some of whom belong to other pods.
|
| Do the conversations remain with just blank lines where I used to
| be?
|
| If not, if the content remains stored somehow then I dont own my
| data and I cant remove it?
| brigadier132 wrote:
| > People will run pods on cheapest VPS and they will get
| hacked, run out of money, get bored, go broke etc.
|
| > Imagine as fractions of content goes missing for a while or
| is just deleted.
|
| All of your complaints apply for the internet. Would you say
| the internet was a bad idea?
| wmf wrote:
| With great power comes great responsibility. In a decentralized
| system you need to take responsibility for your data;
| specifically you need to backup your data. Bluesky has much
| better migration/backup/restore than Mastodon. If you want
| someone else to take responsibility for your data you can use a
| centralized system like Threads.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| > If not, if the content remains stored somehow then I dont own
| my data and I cant remove it?
|
| This is true of any federated system. Once you put things out
| into the world, you can ask that others delete it, but that
| doesn't mean they will.
|
| Even in centralized systems, things like archive.org exist.
|
| In some sense, public statements are always immutable.
| charcircuit wrote:
| PDS are crawled by relays who cache the messages and can offer
| a holistic view over many PDSs for client apps to use. If a PDS
| goes down the data would still be stored by the relay.
| timeon wrote:
| > Imagine as fractions of content goes missing for a while or
| is just deleted.
|
| It may have changed since I have been user there but, I
| consider content on sites like Facebook or Twitter, that is not
| really recent, to be lost anyway. Because searching or browsing
| older content was hard.
| shkkmo wrote:
| The same criticisms and solutions apply to web pages.
|
| Various organizations provide "archive" services. Relays and/or
| AppViews can utilize (or be) such a service. Removal from such
| a service depends on that service's systems (and possibly the
| legal context.)
| secondcoming wrote:
| Just registered on Bluesky, deliberately didn't choose News or
| Politics as an interest, and the first post on my feed is about
| Donald Trump.
|
| There is no escape...
| busymom0 wrote:
| Does anyone know how this differs from the Nostr protocol?
| wmf wrote:
| It's free of any association with cryptocurrency for one thing.
| busymom0 wrote:
| I was asking about protocol, not content.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| Does Bluesky allow different federations to require everyone they
| federate with to share a block list?
|
| Mastodon has this problem and it makes it where you have to have
| multiple accounts if you actually want to use the platform. This
| might sound like not a problem, but it'll naturally lead to
| whatever account has access to 51% of your content being the one
| you use consistently, and you eventually just forget about the
| other 49%.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| I linked to primary sources on moderation upthread:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39471973
|
| Block lists don't work at the instance level, so the answer to
| your question isn't just "no", but that it is impossible.
| vidarh wrote:
| Only in the strictest sense and if you assume nobody will
| build graphs of interactions to use to block instead.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Sure, I was assuming "within the context of the protocol,"
| because if we're willing to step out of that, then
| literally anything can happen.
| vidarh wrote:
| After a couple of years on Mastodon this has just never been an
| issue for me.
|
| If it is one for you, nothing stops you from using s client
| that supports multiple accounts.
|
| But people banding together to not just block proven bad people
| (by whatever criteria) but also those who closely associate
| with them will happen in any federated system one way or other,
| because blocking at an individual level is too cumbersome.
| lancelot-c wrote:
| Farcaster and Lens are much better alternatives than Bluesky. Not
| only you host your own data but you can choose your frontend and
| permissionlessly use the protocol backend. Web3 is the way to go
| for social media.
| kaimac wrote:
| web3 = crypto = scams and weird scammy people. going to be hard
| to undo that association but good luck!
| alexiaya wrote:
| This is nice, but I'm confused about one thing: how can instance
| owners ensure illegal content such as CSAM doesn't get cached on
| their servers if defederation is not a thing?
| shkkmo wrote:
| My understanding is that a PDS instance only hosts data for
| it's users.
|
| Caching can happen at Relays or AppViews and those will
| presumably need to do something to avoid caching CSAM.
| overstay8930 wrote:
| When is this going to support IPv6-only hosting? Would've loved
| to set up an instance to mess around with but requiring IPv4 is a
| showstopper for folks behind CGNAT (i.e. most people on earth).
| nikolay wrote:
| I love Bluesky, but not having DMs is a deal breaker!
| BeetleB wrote:
| The real question:
|
| How many of the well know personalities will abandon Mastodon for
| this?
|
| Mastodon has a surprising number of famous personalities. Many
| popular open source developers live there. Lots of well known
| people in math/science (Terry Tao, etc). Lots of authors (Greg
| Egan, Neil Gaiman, etc). Lots of open source _orgs_.
|
| Will they be willing to move networks yet again? Twitter made
| them unhappy. Will Mastodon be so poor (and Bluesky more
| superior) to get them to move again?
|
| Live and die by network effects.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| It depends which one 100x's the other
| fiatjaf wrote:
| What is the point of hosting your own data? You don't gain
| anything from that, right?
| Repulsion9513 wrote:
| > Specifically, each PDS will be able to host 10 accounts and
| limited to 1500 evts/hr and 10,000 evts/day
|
| Can't have anyone competing with you, after all!
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Basic anti-spam. Just look on Mastodon (and the thankless job
| of many instance mods) or on how Twitter gets overrun with
| porn, crypto, crypto scam or troll bots...
| Repulsion9513 wrote:
| Ah yes, incredibly low limits with no way to say "hey look
| we're quality, let us do more". That's "basic anti-spam".
| Sure.
|
| It's actually "you can host yourself and your friends but
| anyone who doesn't know someone with a server and technical
| knowledge must use our platform"
| jakebsky wrote:
| These are just the initial limits while we work out any
| issues. It'd be bad for everyone if the network was
| immediately overrun with spammers launching PDS hosts with
| millions of fake users/posts, etc. Even though our infra
| might be able to weather this kind of abuse, there are many
| independent feed generators (custom algorithms) operated by
| individuals that would likely fall over.
|
| The plan is to increase limits sufficiently to account for
| all legitimate usage.
|
| (It's also worth pointing out that these limits only apply
| to our Relay service. The expectation is that there will be
| other Relays on the network in the future.)
| donio wrote:
| For what its worth I've yet to see _any_ spam at all in my
| Mastodon feeds (regular user for about a year, accounts on
| multiple instances). Much respect to the admins for staying
| on top of it.
| DerSaidin wrote:
| Can a server hosting an account read all of the data belonging to
| that account?
|
| The feature I'd like to see from federated social network like
| this is encrypt everything to keys only held client side (in the
| style of keybase), so servers can't read content (only some
| surrounding metadata so they know which other servers to
| communicate with about the content).
| DerSaidin wrote:
| > Bluesky is a public social network.
|
| > The AT Protocol, which Bluesky is built on, is designed to
| support public conversations.
|
| Ah, ok.
| sli wrote:
| This is really cool but I think "improving" social media is just
| going deeper into the hole. The incentives are just too perverse
| and hosting stuff is too expensive.
| medstrom wrote:
| Interesting. What's this hole? I used Reddit and HN for a
| decade without complaint (well, the quality of Reddit nosedived
| a few months ago). Seems to me like they can last pretty long
| without perverse incentives. Bbcode forums have often been nice
| too.
| fiatjaf wrote:
| 10 months later, this description of Bluesky is still accurate:
| https://fiatjaf.com/ab1127fb.html
| jrm4 wrote:
| To me, the only question worth asking is the following. If a
| hypothetical guy, let's say his name is Melon Usk (lol) tries to
| buy or otherwise influence Bluesky, he's going to still mostly be
| able to do it with this relatively centralized moderation model,
| yes?
|
| This feels like "thanks for offloading some of the data, but we
| still retain most of the useful control?"
| danpalmer wrote:
| No. There are two components: data storage, and "indexing". You
| can always, feasibly, own your data. Being your own indexer is
| less feasible, but you'd choose one like you'd choose a
| Mastodon instance or something. Portability is trivial because
| you have the data. "Usk" buys your indexer to put ads on it,
| you can just move. Moderation only controls what you see on
| your feed, using a different indexer just means logging into a
| different site and seeing a slightly different set of posts.
| DerSaidin wrote:
| How does this handle spam?
|
| IIUC the main defense is choice over your own feed + moderators
| on the feed you choose.
|
| Is this why DMs are not supported? Because there wouldn't be a
| good spam protection mechanism?
| iteratethis wrote:
| I really like the fresh ideas in Bluesky, in this case especially
| the different ideas regarding federation in comparison to
| Mastodon. I've tried Mastodon extensively and it is lacking in so
| many ways.
|
| There's no algorithmic feed other than "popular" (on large
| instances) which shows the same 10 people posting for months in a
| row, daily. Hence, discovery of people and content is very hard.
| No content or people are recommended and search is broken.
| Ordinary people not belonging to some cultish niche have a very
| hard time compiling a good feed, if they even understand it at
| all.
|
| Federation itself is broken. The boosts and comments to a post do
| not accurately synchronize across the network, it depends on some
| complicated logic regarding whom from your instance follows
| anybody else from the other instance. The bottom line is that you
| may see 3 boosts whilst the original has 12. You may not care
| about boosts, but it's a disaster for comments/replies. Everybody
| is seeing a different subset of replies to the same damn post. It
| drives the OP mad because there will be 20 people replying the
| same thing because they cannot see that others already said it.
|
| Instances have too much power over moderation. They control whom
| the instance federates with server to server. You may be
| following somebody on another instance but your instance owner
| defederates and now your connection is gone. This ability to not
| just moderate content but heavily impact your social graph isn't
| seen anywhere else. And this ability is heavily used as Mastodon
| is a network of activists.
|
| Combine this over-use of moderation with the idea that instances
| go under all the time, and the only sane thing to do for most
| people is to join the default instance. Here you'll have
| reasonable "mainstream" moderation and the biggest federation
| reach with other instances/services. Which kind of defeats the
| point of a distributed social network.
|
| I'm still impressed by what Mastodon has accomplished given its
| grass root origin and shoestring budget, but it's no social media
| of the future.
|
| I don't know if Bluesky is, but at least it has a better design
| regarding nomadic identities, a user's ability to self-moderate,
| content protection, etc.
| deadbabe wrote:
| Why do people value their data so highly?
|
| Can't you just be ephemeral and delete your posts after a few
| days? Seems like nothing good comes from having a huge history of
| things you posted on a social network.
| stevenicr wrote:
| So what data goes and what data is blocked by transitioning away
| from the main server?
|
| I am assuming a person's own posts would come along, but what
| about conversations with other people, or group discussions or
| things you have followed?
|
| Any other features that would work / things you could see if
| still connected but no be available if you were federated and
| banned?
|
| I think fbook has a hidden 'export your posts to WP' option
| somewhere, and you can download a copy of your data (if you are
| not banned / can still login) - but that data would not include
| replies in groups, marketplace, etc (? haven't checked, I'm sure
| other things)
|
| I read they were turning off the groups access API and may not be
| offering a replacement option..
|
| I think there is reasonable debate as to whether or not group
| posts and such should or should not be included in a data dump /
| backup..
|
| Also not familiar with features that bluesky or mastadon or
| twitter do or do not have and what would break if you moved your
| data (would only your part of dms/chats come along? pictures
| others sent you or posted? )
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