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Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

bsky.social

211–220 of 471 posts

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#211

> Specifically, each PDS will be able to host 10 accounts and limited to 1500 evts/hr and 10,000 evts/day Can't have anyone competing with you, after all!

Basic anti-spam. Just look on Mastodon (and the thankless job of many instance mods) or on how Twitter gets overrun with porn, crypto, crypto scam or troll bots...

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#212
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone has been working on a bridge between BlueSky and Mastodon, and uh, it has generated a TREMENDOUS amount of controversy on the Mastodon side. I have my own biases so I don't want to describe it further than that, nor link to it directly so as not to cause even more disagreement, but the controversy does not seem to faze the developer, so I believe you will have your wish.

A global bridge isn't a multi-protocol social server. The guy is free to do as he likes, but I'm saying I don't think public bridges like that are a good architectural decision for decentralized networks. The individual nodes should implement multi-protocol support instead.

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 Bluesky is just another corner of the Fediverse with some pointless differences.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#213
post #167
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.)

Thanks for Caddy, Matt! Some of us on the team have been using Caddy for years, for many of our projects. Because it's so simple, sufficiently high performance, and has lots of nice features.

The on-demand TLS certificates with an "ask" endpoint is especially useful for the PDS use-case. Because there's generally a wildcard DNS name that is used to give each new user a domain handle (@alice.example.com) but we don't want to be vulnerable to a TLS certificate DoS/rate limit situation.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#214
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.

And yet you can be on Mastodon and just never bother to pay attention to any of that drama and your life will barely be affected by it.

The cliques are mostly important to those who choose to make it important for themselves.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was quit the mess. Ryan Barrett is a smart guy and seems quite nice, but it was very ill-advised to unilaterally decide to build an opt-out bridge. In general, if users one platform A want their stuff to be on platform B, they'll find a way to make that happen. If someone else takes it upon themselves to copy everything from A to B, people understandably get pretty bent about it. If it had been an opt-in system,…

Public is public. And someone else will just go build an opt-out (or maybe even no opt-out!) bridge.

Nah. Consent is a thing and this wasn't consensual. Yes, the posts were publicly accessible, but the intent of posting to Mastodon isn't to have it show up automatically on another network. It's technically possible, yes. It's still a dick thing to do and it pissed people off.

And again, it wasn't about Bluesky in particular. If Google announced that they were going to ingest all Mastodon content and post it in a new Google Groups kind of thing, they'd be pretty understandably upset about that, too.

In general, "if I wanted my stuff on Bluesky, I would have put it there". It wasn't the bridge creator's decision to make.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#216
post #64

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.

Federation is nice but when the platform only does one-third of what the platform you're trying to leave does then the whole thing feels like a toy

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#217
post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would only work if Bluesky stays the only significant network node. Which is _possible_, but we haven't seen it with, say, Mastodon. Google Chat was arguably a bit of a special case; vast majority of users never used federation at all, whereas any Bluesky user will, pretty much, just by naturally using Bluesky.

It worked with Mastodon because it was diverse and well-distributed from the beginning even when it was young. I'm skeptical that other people are going to run their own BS servers at scale now that it's been normalized to always just use the firstparty one.

If they really want to they can fix this by closing the central server.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#218

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]

Not sure what your point is. `Left` and `conservative` are not mutually exclusive things. Why are you juxtaposing them here?

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#219

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…

You have nailed it. Bluesky weirdly tries to omit that as much as they can, but they do admit in their protocol descriptions that everything goes through and depends on a central server with absolute power.

They also mention that anyone can run another of these, but there is zero chance anyone will be able to do that.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#220
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…

Hi. If the protocol is open, the software is free and the main instance openly federates with self-hosters, what's the monetization strategy here? Clearly it's not "harvest all the data and figure it out later" as that avenue seems to be shut down internationally by strengthened privacy laws and ads don't work well with federation and third party clients. Is "grow first, figure out how to make money later" still a viable strategy in this economy?
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