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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

#101

Post by hellojesus »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #88
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…

[flagged]

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.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#102

Post by layer8 »

threeseed wrote: post #90
steveklabnik wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#103

Post by jorams »

jakebsky wrote: post #6
bayindirh wrote: post #3

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.

The network is designed to be "locked open" in a way that prevents this. The architecture is designed to work like the web.

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.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#104

Post by steveklabnik »

layer8 wrote: post #102
threeseed wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

> 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.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#105

Post by unshavedyak »

sangnoir wrote: post #66
unshavedyak wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is the AT protocol is superior in your opinion?

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.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#106

Post by packetlost »

hathawsh wrote: post #98
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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...

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.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#107

Post by secstate »

lolinder wrote: post #28
hardcopy wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"embrace" would be the rise of decentralized social media

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.

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.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#108

Post by unshavedyak »

mariusor wrote: post #93
unshavedyak wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Rather underwhelming from which point of view?

From the point of view of a small federated client developer, exploring the ActivityPub protocol. Far from thorough or objective.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#109

Post by steveklabnik »

secstate wrote: post #107
lolinder wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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?

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#110

Post by dotnet00 »

r14c wrote: post #8

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.

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.
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