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Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

bsky.social

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Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#401

Post by danpalmer »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #364
jrm4 wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused, your first word is "no," but your answer seems to suggest "yes, usk would be able to have considerable influence" Which is to say, neither storage nor indexing -- but moderation -- the ability to have control over that would be the most important thing. "Usk" buys (or otherwise leverages money to be able to put his thumb on the control of ) bluesky's moderation. Data storage just gives you the ability t…

Posts on AT are content-addressed. The feeds, as they're called now, just return content links. If "Usk" buys a feed provider it's trivial to move to another one. If you're curious why running a feed is more expensive than simply storing data, it's because you need to ingest the actual data for these links before figuring out what to serve in a feed. This storing, indexing, and aggregating is expensive.

Yeah this is my point. With X users are in a tough position because the platform sucks but they still have a huge amount of sunk cost in it. With Bluesky/AT, that doesn't exist in anywhere near the same way.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#402

Post by mehdix »

paulgerhardt wrote: post #243
jakebsky wrote: post #5

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 he…

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

> If you hadn’t previously noted the difference between a living and a dead butterfly, I’m afraid you will now begin to see dead butterflies EVERYWHERE, as I do.

I didn't know this (as most of us I'd guess). It was an interesting read though, thanks.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#403

Post by consumer451 »

senkora wrote: post #72

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.

Does anyone why firesky went from showing the username, to now showing the "did" user code instead? Is this an effort at some privacy in AT?

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#404

Post by dools »

1shooner wrote: post #311
celdon25 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really unfortunate that the tech companies set the precedent in the first place by pushing hard political agendas into their policies and moderation biases. If it was truly neutral in the first place we would not be having this conversation. All the people complaining only now about Twitter doing this are part of the problem.

Of course people are going to complain about content they don't want. That's the product. Twitter changed their product to deliver different content, so its audience has changed. Calling it 'The Problem' like climate change or the national debt gives it too much power. Just use something else. People use group chats for real relationships now anyway.

FYI a government can’t borrow a currency it issues, there is no national debt (or all money is debt).

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#405

Post by grey_earthling »

wmf wrote: post #327
grey_earthling wrote: post #316

I haven't followed the tech of Bluesky or the AT Protocol closely: does this step mean that people can now set up their own Bluesky instances? Where can I see one in the wild?

Bluesky doesn't have "instances", it has PDSes, Relays, and AppViews. People can run their own PDSes but PDSes are kind of invisible so you won't "see" them. You'll just see the whole Bluesky network as usual.

What I mean is: where is the website other than bsky.app where I can see content from the network?

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#406

Post by mcherm »

itsanaccount wrote: post #33
steveklabnik wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

So presumably today's announcement that they are now supporting self-hosted instances is welcome news to you -- it is a huge stride in the direction you are advocating for.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#407

Post by vidarh »

r14c wrote: post #271
vidarh wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Blu…

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…

Assuming they operate the same way Mastodon itself handles federation and only relay the content people follow, there's no reason you can't fairly straightforwardly scale it by just running more of them. But frankly I'm not convinced Bluesky has much of a future. It needs to 1) offer something significant over the wider Fediverse - which is far more than "just" a Twitter-like and they only have a partial answer to the Twitter-like part - and 2) prevent being embraced and extended. E.g. nothing but inertia prevents the same level of indirection to provide smooth migration as Bluesky offers, and so if users care it will come to other services over ActivityPub too. The good parts of Bluesky will be copied. Then what? Especially if you're on the Bluesky side of a bunch of bridges where people on a lot of the instance on the other side look at you with suspicion and lock you out from their communities.

The limitations on filtering on Bluesky and the culture of filtering on Mastodon where this ability is seen as a community good means that if you want a 'global' view of the combined network, you're going to need to be on the Fediverse side of those bridges. That's not a good position to be in for Bluesky.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#409

Post by torginus »

elpool2 wrote: post #64
emceestork wrote: post #31

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 exe…

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.

I don't see how - I'm not sure how Bluesky works but there must be moderation - otherwise the whole website would succumb to bots and gorespam, so there are people in charge who decide what you get to see.

If the end result is politically unbiased, it's due to their conscious decisions, not some magic algorithm.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#410

Post by consumer451 »

BeetleB wrote: post #184

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…

> Live and die by network effects.

If I have my facts straight, they have gone from 2M to 5M users since they opened to the public just 17 days ago.

And btw, using Neil Gaiman as an example, he is prolific on Bluesky. He has 861 posts on Mastodon, vs 4.5k on Bsky. He seems to have already made the move to a large extent.

https://bsky.app/profile/neilhimself.neilgaiman.com

https://mastodon.social/@neilhimself

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