[HN Gopher] This website is hosted on Bluesky
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       This website is hosted on Bluesky
        
       Author : hasheddan
       Score  : 670 points
       Date   : 2024-11-24 20:43 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (danielmangum.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (danielmangum.com)
        
       | tr1ll10nb1ll wrote:
       | unrelated probably, but it made me realize how I don't really see
       | Hugo/Jekyll type websites anymore.
        
         | hipadev23 wrote:
         | How do you even know? Don't those both just generate static
         | html?
        
           | thesdev wrote:
           | It says "Powered by Hugo" at the bottom of the page.
        
             | Zambyte wrote:
             | Depending on the theme.
        
               | rahkiin wrote:
               | I build my own themes and don't include that either
        
               | mikae1 wrote:
               | Same here
        
           | tr1ll10nb1ll wrote:
           | Footer. also Jekyll/Hugo sites use generator so you can
           | mostly find it in the meta generator tag.
           | 
           | Next.js sites are also a super easy find like this.
        
             | veqq wrote:
             | You can trivially remove it e.g.
             | `disableHugoGeneratorInject = true` in `config.toml`.
        
         | zahlman wrote:
         | I see plenty of _blogs_ generated from Markdown with tools like
         | that.
         | 
         | Has something overtaken Hugo and Jekyll in that space?
        
           | aryonoco wrote:
           | If you like JS/TS, then Astro.
           | 
           | I maintain a blog on Hugo but also host a couple of Astro
           | ones. I think Hugo is great but to my eyes at least Astro has
           | more active development behind it, and I also enjoy it more
           | (probably because I know Typescript more than golang)
        
         | dangerlibrary wrote:
         | I just use mkdocs for everything.
        
           | dv35z wrote:
           | Have you found a decent bare bones starter theme? I've been
           | using MkDocs Material, and I find the theme too complicated
           | (HTML etc) - hoping to find a super simple one that looks
           | decent - plain - and is a good base for theming / styling.
           | Thanks & take care.
        
             | dangerlibrary wrote:
             | I use the readthedocs theme: https://www.mkdocs.org/user-
             | guide/choosing-your-theme/#readt...
             | 
             | Not sure if that fits the bill for you, but I like it.
        
         | teitoklien wrote:
         | I build my own with Jinja2 templates my custom python script +
         | mistune library to parse markdown to html, and a YAML file in
         | similar format to Hugo (the previous generator i used to use)
         | 
         | I found building my own custom one with python3, much more
         | freeing in all sorts of interesting ways, I also exposed the
         | static site generator with a FastAPI based API to auto build my
         | website from my notes, my cooking recipes, database records,
         | financials, git commits, etc to build me a private protected
         | website (via nginx auth) from anywhere, whether via sending a
         | text message to my telegram bot, or running a Shortcuts command
         | on my iPad, or just directly running a command from my
         | terminal.
         | 
         | It took barely a day to setup, and allows me to run interesting
         | custom extensions in all sorts of interesting ways, and builds
         | me a personal website curated to my interest, where the primary
         | viewer is supposed to be me. and it exposes a public barebones
         | website with barely any content for everyone else.
         | 
         | One of these days I think i'll expose more of it to the world.
        
         | edm0nd wrote:
         | We use Github to Jekyll to host a few websites. Works awesome.
        
       | simonw wrote:
       | I was curious as to the security context this runs in:
       | curl -i 'https://porcini.us-east.host.bsky.network/xrpc/com.atpro
       | to.sync.getBlob?did=did:plc:j22nebhg6aek3kt2mex5ng7e&cid=bafkreic
       | 5fmelmhqoqxfjz2siw5ey43ixwlzg5gvv2pkkz7o25ikepv4zeq'
       | 
       | Here are the headers I got back:                   x-powered-by:
       | Express         access-control-allow-origin: *         cache-
       | control: private         vary: Authorization, Accept-Encoding
       | ratelimit-limit: 3000         ratelimit-remaining: 2998
       | ratelimit-reset: 1732482126         ratelimit-policy: 3000;w=300
       | content-length: 268         x-content-type-options: nosniff
       | content-security-policy: default-src 'none'; sandbox
       | content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8         date: Sun, 24 Nov
       | 2024 20:57:24 GMT         strict-transport-security: max-
       | age=63072000
       | 
       | Presumably that ratelimit is against your IP?
       | 
       | "access-control-allow-origin: *" is interesting - it means you
       | can access content hosted in this way using fetch() from
       | JavaScript on any web page on any other domain.
       | 
       | "content-security-policy: default-src 'none'; sandbox" is very
       | restrictive (which is good) - content hosted here won't be able
       | to load additional scripts or images, and the sandbox tag means
       | it can't run JavaScript either: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
       | US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Co...
        
         | nightpool wrote:
         | is the default-src necessary if you're using sandbox or is it
         | redundant?
        
           | johncolanduoni wrote:
           | `sandbox` doesn't affect making requests via HTML (images,
           | stylesheets, etc.).
        
             | nightpool wrote:
             | Right, but what would be the security impact of that
             | compared to just plain HTML? I guess it allows for some
             | form of view counting or IP exfiltration, but other than
             | that anything you can do with an external request you could
             | do with an embedded data URI.
        
               | brewmarche wrote:
               | As far as I understand CSP, since it's set to `none`, no
               | URIs are allowed, not even `data`. Inline scripts and
               | stylesheets are not allowed either, since `unsafe-inline`
               | (or nonces/hashes) is missing.
        
         | benatkin wrote:
         | Blocking/allowlisting all JavaScript is the only way [1] to
         | have a CSP fully contain an app (no exfiltration) [2] and with
         | prefetch that might not be enough. The author is correct at the
         | end to suggest using WebAssembly. (Also, it still has the issue
         | of clicking links, which can be limited to certain domains or
         | even data: by wrapping the untrusted code in an iframe and
         | using child-src on the parent of the iframe)
         | 
         | 1:
         | https://github.com/w3c/webappsec/issues/656#issuecomment-246...
         | 
         | 2: https://www.w3.org/TR/CSP3/#exfiltration
        
           | kmeisthax wrote:
           | Why would WebAssembly provide more protection against
           | exfiltration than JavaScript in this case?
        
             | benatkin wrote:
             | By default WebAssembly doesn't have access to the DOM or
             | JavaScript globals. You have full control of how it can
             | access these things.
        
           | EE84M3i wrote:
           | I didn't realize you could use CSP for preventing
           | exhilaration now! How did they close the WebRTC loopholes?
        
             | benatkin wrote:
             | They haven't. That in the spec stops short of actually
             | saying that it will stop all exfiltration. What it will do
             | is make it harder because you'd have to put the data in a
             | subdomain or in a username/password. It also could make it
             | hard to deny that an attempt to exfiltrate was deliberate.
        
       | bbor wrote:
       | Pretty awesome! Convenience link to the fascinating github issue
       | linked at the bottom, featuring Bluesky celebrity pfrazee:
       | https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/issues/523
       | 
       | I have a lot of hope for AT. I'm sure there's lots of smart
       | people on HN that have done great things with the Fediverse, but
       | this whole paradigm just seems more sustainable + realistic.
       | Basically it gives us centralization by default, but with _real_
       | decentralized support when you need it  / for power users.
        
         | jazzyjackson wrote:
         | As far as sustainability goes I'm hoping for a better business
         | model than "accept funds from Blockchain Capital" [0], some
         | return on investment in mirroring the firehouse. I can muse, a
         | Discord alternative where some users pay to host longer videos
         | (current limit is 60sec [1]) or Patreon where a relay takes a
         | cut in exchange for managing access/decryption keys, or
         | Bandcamp or some other kind of social marketplace - as it is
         | theres no reason I couldn't do this, it is an open platform
         | after all.
         | 
         | [0] https://www.blockchaincapital.com/blog/bluesky-13m-users-
         | and...
         | 
         | [1] https://bsky.social/about/blog/09-11-2024-video
        
           | bbor wrote:
           | Yeah I'm also worried about profitability, tho not
           | particularly concerned about that particular investor,
           | personally; all VCs are inherently amoral profit generators.
           | They are a "benefit corporation" like anthropic, which gives
           | them some leeway to deny shareholder requests in the name of
           | public good. Which is nice!
           | 
           | In general I feel like social media is in the perfect spot
           | for a huge shakeup as display ads breathe their last breath.
           | Even if Google wins/draws out its Display Ads antitrust case
           | and successfully implements some new interest-tagging system,
           | I think anyone with a calculator and a newspaper subscription
           | can read the leaves at this point; people are concerned about
           | their data, and the money it generates is peanuts compared to
           | more traditional advertising schemes. All of this is of
           | course not even mentioning what I think intuitive algorithms
           | will do (cynical or no, there's lots of credentialed
           | scientists saying that AGI (!!) is within reach in the coming
           | decade, if not the coming few year).
           | 
           | All that to say: I feel like they can find a way to make it
           | work. Revenue doesn't need to be as high anyway if you a)
           | don't have 1000 devs optimizing Display Ad A/B tests all day,
           | and b) have the support of the open source community.
        
             | yokem55 wrote:
             | If they can get ~100k subs to a $10/mo premium service
             | similar to discord nitro, they are probably close to
             | breaking even at the current scale and ops methodology.
             | Which seems feasible.
        
           | pm90 wrote:
           | Im hoping that most of the infra costs get amortized by
           | people bringing on their PDS's, while some of the core stuff
           | (app layer, iOS app etc.) is maintained by a small team
           | funded by donations/subscriptions.
        
       | leoc wrote:
       | https://bsky.app/profile/leocomerford.bsky.social/post/3l7v6...
       | To help the hard of clicking, this time I have pasted it all for
       | you:
       | 
       | Leo R. Comerford @leocomerford.bsky.social
       | 
       | Why was it decided not to build on any existing content-
       | addressable networking system (IPFS or whatever)?
       | 
       | November 1, 2024 at 12:39 PM
       | 
       | Leo R. Comerford @leocomerford.bsky.social * 23d
       | 
       | (Not implying that this was the wrong decision, it's a genuine
       | question.)
       | 
       | dan @danabra.mov * 23d
       | 
       | actually not sure i can answer this well. paging @bnewbold.net or
       | maybe @why.bsky.team (who worked on IPFS btw)
       | 
       | dan @danabra.mov * 23d
       | 
       | my guess is that we'd want data hosting to be under direct
       | control of the user (same as web hosting) rather than peer-to-
       | peer, want instant deletion/edits at the source, need ability to
       | move to a different host or take content down, need grouping into
       | collections. not sure how much IPFS could adapt
       | 
       | dan @danabra.mov * 23d
       | 
       | we do use some pieces from IPFS through (aside from the actual
       | peer to peer mechanism) bryan newbold @bnewbold.net * 4mo
       | 
       | you can basically ignore it, we don't use "IPFS" proper anywhere.
       | 
       | there are strong social connections, and we borrow some tech
       | components like CIDs (flexible hash/digest syntax) and DAG-CBOR
       | (more-deterministic subset of CBOR, good for signing+hashing)
       | 
       | Bumblefudge @bumblefudge.com * 1d
       | 
       | yeah this is all accurate. bluesky remixed a lot of IPFS
       | components and patterns in interesting ways, but the monolithic
       | global IPFS network (with chatty DHT distribution) wouldn't make
       | sense here, BS made an infinitely more efficient/performant
       | distribution of bytes tailored to its use case.
       | 
       | Bumblefudge @bumblefudge.com * 1d
       | 
       | FWIW the IPFS foundation is working on making IPFS more modular
       | and easily remixed for future BlueSkies, but it's a big task
       | decomposing the monolith and reorienting the documentation and
       | ergonomics...
       | 
       | [a second reply to the first skeet:]
       | 
       | Uai @why.bsky.team * 23d
       | 
       | As far as im concerned (and i led ipfs development for a number
       | of years) we _are_ using ipfs, just a specific streamlined
       | implementation of it. All your repo data can be imported into an
       | ipfs node and addressed via cid
       | 
       | Uai @why.bsky.team * 23d
       | 
       | We dont use libp2p because for a consumer mobile app we didnt
       | want to futz with nat traversal and connectivity and the like,
       | but its definitely possible to build a p2p version of bluesky
        
         | echelon wrote:
         | "skeet" is such a terrible term for this. It's like mastodon
         | "toot"s.
         | 
         | Using bodily functions as core infra terminology is off-putting
         | and feels like a bit like a juvenile boy's club. I get that
         | some people find it funny, but it alienates people. We should
         | just call these "posts".
         | 
         | Same thing with names like CockroachDB and GIMP.
        
           | xeeeeeeeeeeenu wrote:
           | The official Bluesky FAQ says this:
           | 
           | >What is a post on Bluesky called?
           | 
           | >The official term is "post."
           | 
           | https://bsky.social/about/blog/5-19-2023-user-faq
        
           | leoc wrote:
           | Sure, whatever: I had certainly given it approximately no
           | thought in this case, and my personal investment in 'sk**t'
           | is zero. I'd edit my post but I seem to have hit the timeout.
           | I will also say that I don't think this is the _most_
           | interesting or on-topic thread to pull on from my comment.
        
           | bbor wrote:
           | Hard agree -- this one is especially bad because it's
           | gendered. We'll see what happens, but I'd put my money on
           | "post" winning out. There's some people on Bluesky who feel
           | absurdly strong about this because of the history (the CEO
           | asked them not to use it so they used it more often as a
           | joke), but they're simply outnumbered already. Such is
           | exponential growth...
        
           | singpolyma3 wrote:
           | Eevn better: call them tweets. That's what they are.
        
           | mjmsmith wrote:
           | Huh, I thought it was a reference to shooting: fling your hot
           | take into the sky in front of an audience ready to blow it to
           | smithereens.
        
       | steveklabnik wrote:
       | Ah this is super cool! I've been thinking about doing this with
       | my website, but was going to leverage the whtwind lexicon, since
       | my site is mostly a blog. But for the front page, and anything
       | else, I may have wanted something else.
       | 
       | This is more of an unstructured approach, which is cool because
       | it needs less specialized tooling. It has the disadvantage of
       | being... well, just a blob. No semantic information there.
        
       | pfraze wrote:
       | Appreciated Daniel reaching out to the team about this! Hosting
       | blobs is one of those things that will inevitably go through
       | iterations as we understand the abuse vectors more and more, but
       | for now it's really fun to see this kind of usage in action. The
       | PDS is meant to be a database host in the same sense that a
       | webserver is a website host.
        
         | sebmellen wrote:
         | Are you ever going to bring back Beaker Browser? Used to love
         | playing around with that! Didn't realize you'd gone on to
         | Bluesky, very neat.
        
           | pfraze wrote:
           | Thanks! Probably won't revive it, but it was a great
           | experience. Wrote some notes on it here: https://github.com/b
           | eakerbrowser/beaker/blob/master/archive-...
        
         | moritonal wrote:
         | Congrats on finding a role at Bluesky. Beaker was such an
         | amazing project to follow, that experience must be so useful.
        
         | nileshtrivedi wrote:
         | Doesn't the potential for abuse reduce when content is linked
         | through user's own domain rather than a particular appview like
         | bsky? Bsky already supports a user's domain ALIASed to
         | redirect.bsky.com:
         | https://bsky.app/profile/jacob.gold/post/3kh6rnpdzmp2v
        
           | philipwhiuk wrote:
           | If people use BlueSky as a magnet link for illegal content it
           | will quickly become a problem.
        
         | philipwhiuk wrote:
         | You're walking headfirst into the copyright, CSAM, pornography
         | hole of content moderation here.
        
           | nutanc wrote:
           | Agreed. I assume this will open up Bluesky to a lot of
           | potential legal problems. But will it be any different from
           | accesing the content using the app as the content is anyway
           | hosted.
           | 
           | That said, just the other day I was thinking, is the reverse
           | possible. I have a web site/blog. Use RSS and then the RSS
           | updates are posted to a handle on Bluesky. I would assume
           | that's a lot more useful?
        
             | diggan wrote:
             | > That said, just the other day I was thinking, is the
             | reverse possible. I have a web site/blog. Use RSS and then
             | the RSS updates are posted to a handle on Bluesky. I would
             | assume that's a lot more useful?
             | 
             | This is trivial, I'm currently doing this for
             | https://bsky.app/profile/aemet-bot.bsky.social which reads
             | a bunch of RSS feeds from AEMET (Spain's national weather
             | service basically) and posts warnings to the feed if there
             | is any warning above Yellow.
             | 
             | The code for managing this is about ~200 lines of Rust
             | code.
        
               | skiman10 wrote:
               | Do you have that code posted somewhere by chance? I would
               | be interested in browsing through it!
        
               | diggan wrote:
               | Not right now, no. It's fairly simple (login to Bluesky,
               | read RSS, save item IDs to a text file, post if there are
               | any new feed items, close program then systemd timers run
               | this every N minutes) + pretty specific to AEMET and
               | their formats.
               | 
               | If there is interest I guess I could spend some hours to
               | make it a bit more generic and publish the source.
        
               | skiman10 wrote:
               | Cool yeah. I think the thing I was most interested in was
               | interacting with Bluesky through rust. Is there a decent
               | sdk for that?
        
           | thesuitonym wrote:
           | How is this any different than the regular hole of content
           | moderation they're already in?
        
             | chefandy wrote:
             | I don't have a well-considered answer, but a) I imagine
             | being able to host a phishing site on an official domain
             | from them using their SSL cert is problematic, and b) my
             | gut says that as soon as you start hosting arbitrary
             | files-- e.g. zip files-- and browser executable JavaScript
             | with your domain in there, that's a different level of
             | possible content. I guess the question is whether or not
             | the disposition of a social media network makes that more
             | problematic than it does with, say, Google drive.
        
               | preciousoo wrote:
               | It's not possible for me, a non Google employee to create
               | a file that's hosted on Google.com, or any Google domain
               | and have it read in the browser as text/html, bypassing
               | many a firewall, for example
        
               | edm0nd wrote:
               | Yes it is. Via sites.google.com or Google Docs.
               | 
               | These are abused all the time for phishing and malicious
               | threat actors.
        
           | pfraze wrote:
           | As opposed to running a social network? What else is new
        
       | Retr0id wrote:
       | The CSP headers didn't used to be there, which I used to pop an
       | alert(), way back. (at the time there was also a MIME whitelist,
       | but that whitelist included image/svg+xml, which allows script
       | execution)
        
       | la64710 wrote:
       | I think the AT protocol is versatile in that users can acces each
       | others data once authenticated without any centralized service
       | (granted the aggregators and some other things may still be
       | centralized).
        
         | jazzyjackson wrote:
         | Is there any auth necessary to pull data from a PDS? I know the
         | main relay is a public firehouse so I would be surprised, but
         | maybe the PDS can put relay servers on an allowlist?
        
           | anon7000 wrote:
           | As far as I can tell, all content on ATProto is fully public
           | without auth
        
             | unshavedyak wrote:
             | Does it federate or anything? Wonder what up to date
             | summaries exist of it's capabilities
        
               | jazzyjackson wrote:
               | If by federate you mean "is stored on content addressed,
               | signed merkle trees that can be mirrored and served from
               | more than one domain" then yes
               | 
               | Also it's uh, atproto.com
        
         | irusensei wrote:
         | So the recent push to artists to move there to protect their
         | rights against AI training is not only false but a trap since
         | anyone can point their cannons to train data on Bluesky.
        
       | h4x0rr wrote:
       | Anyone else feels like this will be abused for phishing and/or
       | malware distribution?
        
         | remram wrote:
         | I don't see how. This is a direct link to the author's bluesky
         | server (PDS) so of course it is controlled by them.
        
           | benatkin wrote:
           | Lack of moderation combined with an offical-sounding domain
           | name.
           | 
           | This would have to get the user to follow a link or call a
           | phone number or something though. These are plausible. It's
           | too bad the content-security-policy can't prevent following
           | links.
        
             | extraduder_ire wrote:
             | Bluesky seems to use a lot of totally different domain
             | names for each part of their infrastructure, maybe for this
             | reason. e.g. this one is bsky.network
             | 
             | While they're nowhere close on volume, they're certainly
             | beating microsoft in terms of the rate they're adding
             | similar looking official URLs.
        
               | whywhywhywhy wrote:
               | > bsky.network
               | 
               | Shortening your brand to 4 letters when your chosen TLD
               | is the same length as your full brand name is such a
               | weird choice.
        
               | tomrod wrote:
               | This is why you and I aren't in charge of marketing I
               | reckon.
        
               | wise_young_man wrote:
               | I guess bsky.net and bluesky.net were taken. What's weird
               | is why ICANN allowed .network TLD at all when .net
               | already existed, was shorter, and meant for that.
        
               | Symbiote wrote:
               | I can't be the only person who visited bluesky.com,
               | assuming that was the thing everyone was talking about.
        
             | anon7000 wrote:
             | I mean, the way AT Proto is designed, moderation primarily
             | happens on the app layer, not the protocol layer. So on an
             | app like Bluesky, you can have a lot of moderation. But the
             | protocol itself allows hosting arbitrary content in a
             | distributed/decentralized way.
        
           | ndjdjddjsjj wrote:
           | Phish could be this:
           | 
           | $inane_marketing_trope
           | 
           | ...
           | 
           | Click here to Unsubscribe from Bluesky
           | 
           | https://porcini.us-
           | east.host.bsky.network/xrpc/com.atproto.s...
           | 
           | ...
           | 
           | Redirects to bad site.
        
             | remram wrote:
             | As long as content is authored by the administrator of the
             | server, I don't see where there is a security issue.
             | 
             | It's like if you point to your own Apache server in your
             | own domain where you host a scam page and say there's a
             | security issue with Apache because you could do that.
             | 
             | Or are you saying that you can make this person's server
             | serve third-party content?
        
               | ndjdjddjsjj wrote:
               | > Or are you saying that you can make this person's
               | server serve third-party content?
               | 
               | Http: yes see OP
               | 
               | Email: not sure. Hopefully not. But spoofing happens.
        
           | nicky0 wrote:
           | The link in question (linked from the the sumbitted link) is
           | `porcini.us-east.host.bsky.network`. That's hosted by bsky,
           | isn't it?
        
         | lazystar wrote:
         | is there any hosting site that isn't? feels like a computing
         | law at this point; if you build a hosting site, someone will
         | try to use it for malicious purposes.
        
           | EGreg wrote:
           | Can't you just make the hosting site features only be for
           | real purposes?
           | 
           | Like a link shortener which only forwards to a domain that
           | matches the subdomain? Or only for watching videos and
           | collecting metrics etc.
        
             | internetter wrote:
             | Any file upload can be used for unintended purposes, eg
             | encoding files into static to upload to youtube and all
             | other sorts of tomfoolery:
             | https://github.com/boehs/awesome-cloud-storage-abuse
        
         | ineedaj0b wrote:
         | hehehe. I pinned it to the top research ideas. I'll get back to
         | you on this
        
         | bigfatkitten wrote:
         | It'll take about 5 mins for that to happen and then for
         | *.bsky.network to start getting blocked by Google Safe
         | Browsing, Palo Alto, Bluecoat etc.
        
         | kuschku wrote:
         | It will be. We had the same issue with Matrix attachments.
        
           | Arathorn wrote:
           | got fixed by https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-
           | proposals/blob/mai... fwiw
        
       | edavis wrote:
       | If this sort of thing interests you, check out atfile:
       | https://github.com/electricduck/atfile
        
       | skybrian wrote:
       | I'm wondering whether a third-party PDS implementation should
       | support other protocols as well. Would a combined git/PDS repo
       | make any sense at all? (That is, it's a PDS, but it also
       | implements enough of git to do read-only access via git
       | commands.)
       | 
       | What other protocols would make sense?
        
       | anacrolix wrote:
       | https://github.com/anacrolix/btlink
        
         | erlend_sh wrote:
         | I guess pkdns is a newer, actively maintained version of the
         | same thing? https://github.com/pubky/pkdns
        
       | hi_hi wrote:
       | Could some awesome person possibly summarise any limitations or
       | use cases where this might not work well?
       | 
       | The example provided is quite basic static text, so I'm wondering
       | if there's a reason for that?
        
       | slowhadoken wrote:
       | Whenever I hear about Bluesky I think about Jack Dorsey quitting
       | their board and asked people to stay on Twittet/X.
       | 
       | https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/may/07/j...
        
         | crabmusket wrote:
         | What do you think about it?
         | 
         | What I remember about that whole affair is that I'd really
         | respected Jack for starting Bluesky, allowing it to be
         | independent of Twitter (and Jay deserves a heaping of credit
         | for pushing that!), and then losing that respect when he seemed
         | to totally misunderstand what Bluesky had gone on to achieve.
         | 
         | https://www.techdirt.com/2024/05/13/bluesky-is-building-the-...
         | 
         | Jack was pushing Nostr at the time which... seems ok if you're
         | into that. But his arguments in his interview with Mike Solana
         | really didn't make sense to me.
        
           | strogonoff wrote:
           | Bluesky's attitude seems logical and their reasoning aligns
           | with my thoughts exactly.
           | 
           | If techdirt's article is to be believed, Dorsey's departure
           | has to do with going from an extreme to an extreme--from a
           | traditional social monolith to a pure protocol--whereas
           | Bluesky chose to pursue not only the protocol, but also "the
           | app" as the face of that protocol for the ordinary user, and
           | let's face it: the ordinary user does not really care about
           | protocols.
           | 
           | My speculation about him suggesting people "stay on Twitter"
           | is that Nostr (which he apparently is invested in now) and
           | Twitter are orthogonal, so there is no conflict there, but
           | Bluesky competes with both.
           | 
           | Not a Bluesky user (the invite-only period has put me off for
           | a while), but if they do not compromise on the protocol part
           | (and there are no shenanigans unfolding, who knows, maybe
           | Dorsey found something) their attitude seems to me to be the
           | most reasonable for a mainstream social platform.
        
             | apitman wrote:
             | What's your issue with invite-only periods? Is there a
             | better way to throttle signups while you scale a system
             | early on?
        
               | irusensei wrote:
               | The invite-only system established the main Bluesky
               | instance as a big circlejerk.
               | 
               | It worked with Orkut back in the day where the internet
               | was new and untainted by culture wars.
               | 
               | Bluesky is lefty twitter now and I want no business with
               | that platform.
        
               | tomrod wrote:
               | > Bluesky is lefty twitter now and I want no business
               | with that platform.
               | 
               | I love hearing people say this, because in reality
               | Bluesky covers most of the political dimensions one wants
               | to subdivide a population by except the most toxic of
               | participants. Also, most of the academics have moved to
               | Bluesky because Twitter became toxic / suppressed speech
               | dramatically and at the whims of one Mr. Musk. As per
               | usual, where the "lefties" are the "righties" follow (to
               | use the parlance of the prior comment) be is social
               | media, good policy, you name it.
               | 
               | Plenty of conservatives are there, such as Lincoln
               | project folks, right libertarians, and even National
               | Review & Reason IIRC. But I guess these folks don't count
               | these days as conservative (despite definitionally being
               | so, just not aligned with modern US Republican policy
               | planks)? Not sure.
               | 
               | Anyhow, I'm enjoying Bluesky for what it is -- a new
               | social media platform that isn't fully encumbered by bots
               | and nonsense for a bit.
        
               | natoliniak wrote:
               | > Twitter became toxic / suppressed speech dramatically
               | 
               | But what kind of speech is supressed nowadays on X? what
               | about Bluesky? does Bluesky not supress any speech?
        
               | BryantD wrote:
               | Sure. CSAM.
               | 
               | Meanwhile Twitter is now openly suppressing links off-
               | site. For financial reasons rather than ideological ones
               | (although the latter may also be occurring).
        
               | wesleytodd wrote:
               | But if you use _web scale_ tech you can scale to infinity
               | on day one right? :eye-roll:
        
         | rsynnott wrote:
         | I mean, honestly, losing Dorsey was probably a big part of its
         | success.
        
       | SAHChandler wrote:
       | I'm very hopeful for the possibility of using bluesky for blob
       | data.
       | 
       | A friend and I had considered looking into storing DOOM WADs on
       | bluesky so that "map packs" could be shared in the same way posts
       | are. Follow an account, a list, or a starter pack, and you could
       | theoretically modify GZDoom or some other client to know how to
       | search and view any WADs posted by those accounts. Like how the
       | Steam Workshop works, except it's via bluesky. :D
        
         | dev0p wrote:
         | So, basically using Bluesky as an RSS feed for arbitrary data?
         | Kind of?
        
           | pests wrote:
           | RSS is already an RSS feed for arbitrary data. :D
           | 
           | I joke but RSS does work for his use case just as well minus
           | the distributed/federated points.
        
         | Rick76 wrote:
         | This is a cool idea, are you thinking of self-hosting this or
         | on their servers? Have they mentioned anything about any
         | guidelines for what their blob storage can be used for? I know
         | doom is small and that's a great idea, a workshop is a perfect
         | example of how this can be used. I'm just wondering if this can
         | be abused to outsource large server space.
        
           | verdverm wrote:
           | Look into Lexicon on https://atproto.com
           | 
           | You can define custom records for basically anything
           | 
           | A PDS would be a point in the network that decides if abuse
           | is happening, also a place where competition can occur
        
       | neuroelectron wrote:
       | What's the license for the Bluesky data btw? Is it something free
       | to mirror and train LLMs on?
        
         | phs318u wrote:
         | Based on https://bsky.social/about/support/tos#user-content , I
         | would answer yes. While it's not expressly called out
         | (permitted or forbidden), my reading of the above would
         | indicate that it's not forbidden per se, and probably permitted
         | ("Modify or otherwise utilize User Content in any media. This
         | includes reproducing, preparing derivative works, distributing,
         | performing, and displaying your User Content."). I believe
         | training an LLM falls under "utilize" and "preparing derivative
         | works".
        
           | jamilton wrote:
           | That's about your user content, not others'.
        
         | anon7000 wrote:
         | So the ToS explicitly says Bluesky does NOT own your data.
         | 
         | However, data on AT Proto is fully public and it'd be trivial
         | for someone to extract the data for AI to train.
         | 
         | For example, this app shows you entries hosted on the protocol:
         | https://atproto-browser.vercel.app/at/nytimes.com
        
       | willscott wrote:
       | One of the points that is made is that since the PDS that's being
       | interacted with here is part of a 'Personal Data Server' rather
       | than the Bluesky product, it ends up able to offer infinite free
       | data storage.
       | 
       | This seems like one of the things that might be part of the
       | references the bluesky team has made at time to introducing a
       | subscription service - providing more space / bandwidth / higher
       | quality video on your PDS seems like the type of hosting that
       | could be offered at a premium tier.
        
         | hk1337 wrote:
         | > 'Personal Data Server' rather than the Bluesky product
         | 
         | If I understood correctly, the PDS was hosted on Bluesky. I
         | assume it could be hosted somewhere else, so yeah it could be
         | interacted with more than Bluesky.
        
       | rsynnott wrote:
       | There should really be a name for this phenomenon; put basically
       | anything on the internet, and sooner or later people will try to
       | host arbitrary files on it.
        
         | superzamp wrote:
         | There's already "parasitic computation" so we could probably go
         | for "parasitic data storage"
        
         | miningape wrote:
         | Johnson's Law: The more attention something receives, the
         | bigger it's area of impact becomes.
        
           | marcosscriven wrote:
           | I thought that was the Streisand effect?
        
             | kingofheroes wrote:
             | The Streisand is "the more you try to hide something, the
             | bigger its area of impact becomes".
        
           | sequoia wrote:
           | Is this comment intended to have a bawdy subtext or am I just
           | reading to much into it?
        
         | Suppafly wrote:
         | >and sooner or later people will try to host arbitrary files on
         | it.
         | 
         | I'm pretty sure that's a key reason that google accounts are
         | limited to 15gb now until you pay for more storage. When it was
         | unlimited there were all these opensource projects coming up
         | with ideas to backup your filesystem to gmail and such which
         | got even worse when Drive came about. These free services need
         | to foresee that that will be an issue and put in some basic
         | limits.
        
         | Jerrrry wrote:
         | Inner Platform effect
         | 
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect
        
       | genem9 wrote:
       | "Hosting websites" has been possible on nostr for some time
       | already with npub.pro ...
        
       | the-chitmonger wrote:
       | I wasn't around for this specific era, but the way users of
       | BlueSky are able to dive deep into technological waters reminds
       | me of how people talk about learning HTML for the first time
       | while using MySpace. Social media is a more saturated market now
       | than before, but I wonder if we'll see a new generation of
       | programmers sprout from BlueSky.
        
         | crowcroft wrote:
         | MySpace and old forums walked you up a ladder of abstraction
         | from, I'm adding some text into a box and it shows up on the
         | webpage -> I'm adding some images as well -> I'm adding some
         | BBCode/Markup and now things look really custom -> I'm writing
         | HTML and CSS -> I'm writing complete scripts.
         | 
         | Bluesky does the first step and then it's a great big leap from
         | there imo.
        
         | athrowaway3z wrote:
         | > 14-minute read
         | 
         | I see a dozen links I suspect are required reading to try out
         | new ideas.
         | 
         | With HTTP/HTML you can show somebody who knows only the most
         | basic Python, or any other PL, how to build a server from
         | scratch in those 14 minutes.
         | 
         | I'm convinced we need hash-addressable communication protocols
         | to redefine the relationship we have with the tech-giants, and
         | stop them exploiting our communities.
         | 
         | I'm not convinced the ATProtocol has hit the mark well enough
         | to kick start a revolution like HTTP did.
        
       | layer8 wrote:
       | Someone implementing a file hosting service on top of Bluesky
       | would explain a steep growth in user accounts. ;)
        
         | consumer451 wrote:
         | This video has nothing to do with Bluesky, but I think it
         | provides a more likely explanation. Don't let the title fool
         | you, it covers more than bots.
         | 
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZ5XN_mJE8Y
        
       | srg0 wrote:
       | My first reaction was like -- wow, a site that runs on a reverb
       | pedal.
        
         | code_for_monkey wrote:
         | this website has the toan
        
       | hk1337 wrote:
       | https://atproto.com/guides/glossary
       | 
       | How exactly is the personal data server used? Examples and such?
       | 
       | The link gives a nice high level explanation but I still am not
       | sure of its purpose.
        
       | rpastuszak wrote:
       | Just a (very unserious) reminder that you can host +7kb of data
       | in a single tweet using data URIs + gzip.
       | 
       | Here's Pong (HTML + JS) and the Epic of Gilgamesh:
       | https://x.com/rafalpast/status/1316836397903474688
       | 
       | (brought to you by the ad tracking pixel parameters ignoring the
       | tweet length limit)
       | 
       | More links + the "Twitter CDN" editor(tm):
       | https://sonnet.io/projects#:~:text=Laconic!%20(a%20Twitter%2...
        
       | hiop wrote:
       | The recent API changes in Strava reminded me of how limited our
       | access is to the data stored on their platform. As a dominant
       | player in the fitness space, they could gradually lock features
       | behind a subscription wall.
       | 
       | While this might raise privacy or safety concerns, could the AT
       | Protocol be a suitable platform for storing GPX or FIT files?
        
         | d-lo wrote:
         | I'd love a federated Strava replacement. Unfortunately I don't
         | believe that the AT Protocol supports private or limited
         | visibility posts yet, which I think is a pretty key feature for
         | Strava's use case.
        
           | brw wrote:
           | Once atproto has first party support for private records I'm
           | definitely expecting a massive increase in interest. It would
           | open so many doors and is probably the main thing holding
           | back many potential use cases as of now.
        
       | alpb wrote:
       | Right now it's the only page under site:bsky.network if you
       | search for that. Hilarious and awesome!
       | https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Absky.network Daniel is a
       | great hacker.
        
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