261–270 of 327 posts
> Are people migrating to alternative hosting? Yes, are they? Where are the alternative hosting that do the same thing as Bluesky?
As I mentioned in the article, I literally migrated to https://eurosky.tech/accounts/ yesterday.
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Sure, there are servers, but the different grouping is the whole point because they're not coupling hosting to apps. When people say "where are Bluesky instances", they're asserting that it's useful to run many copies of the Bluesky database server. My article is an attempt to show that this way of thinking is very Mastodon-brained because these "instances" are the only unit of decentralization that's available in Ma…
You're treating Mastodon as the protocol here, and sure it's a combined frontend/backend, and it is the most used one, but its just one implementation of the AP protocol. You can plug your favourite AP app/frontend into any Mastodon instance.
>I say “Mastodon” here because if I say “ActivityPub” instead, a crowd of people will show up and say that actually what I’m describing is how Mastodon chose to implement ActivityPub. Whereas ActivityPub by itself does not really specify how to actually use it in practice.
I understand there's other ways to use AP, but when people say "where are Bluesky instances" they are specifically comparing AT to Mastodon's AP topology.
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I don't understand how running your own Relay is related to competing with Bluesky. A Relay is just a dumb websocket broadcaster. Yes, you can absolutely run one on your own if you don't want to rely on any of the existing ones. I don't think this has to do with competition.
I'm saying that if there is any required component of a full ATProto setup whose lowest-friction implementation is "use the One True Central Implementation, which every tool defaults to and which will be very painful to change", then it's not a decentralized protocol. Are there any components of ATProto that are found not through a service discovery mechanism that would seamlessly migrate to a new service, but by eve…
So all the content servers under one big auth infra; you could post anything on relays and apps, doesn't matter because your account is banned and nobody has the key to fetch those invalid data from relays. I mean, that's how it went, after all. BS/AT is a fine replacement for twitpic-era Twitter, but it's not a locked-open decentralized social media.
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How about, less than what many people pay for a tank of gas? Most people won't do it, but they don't have to, and it's not a particularly expensive hobby.
In the US. How about in Kenya or Laos? Plenty of places where $30/month is closer to “median monthly income” than “an expense you’d barely notice”.
The RSS comparison is misleading. Atproto apps are not like an RSS reader that runs on the users' computers and connects directly to the sources of content. Atproto apps are servers that control, filter and shape the content they serve to readers. Atproto apps can censor, shadowban, show ads, algorithmize the feed into anything it wants. The user is powerless and the creator is a victim that can't do anything besides…
The difference is that it’s competitive. New apps can rise up that provide alternative lenses over the network. In the crudest case, literally showing everything. Which is what you wanted. Maybe that won’t get into an App Store but it definitely works if there’s demand for that.
Now, sure, you can use a different instance for most of these services. And that instance can interoperate with Bluesky. But that's the case for Mastodon as well, and the real difference is the Fediverse has had to live with the painful compromises that come with the anarchy of the real world. I think Bluesky will discover its own version of defederation soon enough. I don't think “ah, but you technically theoretically can still interact with people even if you can't see them on your instance” is worth all that much.
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I could see "Bluesky AppView" has similar semantic as Mastodon instance: network, moderation... The difference is on ATProto, when I get banned, people must switch to another "AppView instance" (could be reusing the same Bluesky AppView stack) to interact with me. I summary, my data is not lock in, but my audience could be. On the other aspect, Bluesky AppView is only a small part (a microblogging network) of the big…
Yeah I wanted to say that. From a user's point of view, it sounds like the AppView is the instance. If you disagree with the moderation, you can move to a different AppView (that may use different relays) but keep your PDS. Whereas with Mastodon your PDS is your AppView, so if you leave the AppView you lose your PDS (and have to somehow export it). Is that correct?
Every time I see a post praising ATProto on HN I cannot shake the feeling that this might be the product of a concerted (and VC-backed) marketing effort. ATProto is "decentr-washing" as far as I'm concerned. Even if you self-host as much as possible, if Bluesky's relay declines to crawl your PDS, or its AppView declines to index/serve your records, then to essentially the entire audience you simply don't exist. did:p…