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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

#161

Post by shkkmo »

heroprotagonist wrote: post #136
danabramov wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 rea…

> 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.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#163

Post by numpad0 »

j-james wrote: post #123
steveklabnik wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Moder…

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.

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.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#164

Post by DevX101 »

pfraze wrote: post #41
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…

It's a fair point and we definitely debated it, but it was too important to us that we complete the mission.

You guys made the right call. You're not trying to become the next TikTok.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#165

Post by jakebsky »

mightyham wrote: post #125
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…

I'm a little confused why the PDS server is both dockerized and has an installation exclusive to Ubuntu/Debian.

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.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#166

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#167

Post by mholt »

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…

Awesome! Why did you choose Caddy as a proxy for PDS? (Caddy creator here.)

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#168

Post by myaccountonhn »

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…

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.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#169

Post by jakebsky »

mariusor wrote: post #91
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…

Are there any independent projects implementing the AT protocol?

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

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#170

Post by adra »

packetlost wrote: post #106
hathawsh wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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