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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

#221

Post by numpad0 »

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…

I think the composable part comes from some internally recognized and more specific operational needs. There are multiple overlapping and sometimes offending legal requirements for free speeches and its limits, let alone ethical ones, on this planet.

e.g. Call for democracy can be highly illegal in some regions(no, not just in China, or just few countries that are "super backwards"). Some may wish to say that those regions are objectively wrong and deserve no attentions, those who ingest such content should fight to death for that speech, or something heroic along that. It's not that simple and easy, and in those cases a "zero tolerance on criticisms for social systems" filter might be useful in letting user in for what is worthwhile without asking for their lives nor blood on our hands.

btw, if only it was always something that heroic. Mastodon Fediverse exploded and sheared into camps of censored loli, uncensored furry, alt-right terrorism, and myriad rest of none-of-it isolates, all slowly declining. A global unified federated microblogging network that was almost completed, over that.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#222

Post by Repulsion9513 »

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.

Whereas the GP comment was based on... an anecdote from a celebrity. Definitely more trustworthy. Yep.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#223

Post by pr337h4m »

Repulsion9513 wrote: post #210
pr337h4m wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mastodon DMs have absolutely no privacy: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/18079 For a decentralized protocol doing things right is much more important than doing things fast, it is very difficult (and in a lot of cases impossible) to break backwards compatibility.

DMs on any other service also have no privacy. Signal or Telegram could read your DMs by simply releasing an update to their code, for example. You always have to trust the person running the service you use. (Unless you have E2EE/something like OTR, in which case you have to trust the persom who makes that code!)

The whole point of end-to-end encryption is that you don't have to trust the people running the service you use.

If Signal releases a malicious update (and they don't provide reproducible builds), it is very much possible for you to know about it, as everything is on your device. Even if the binaries are different from the source code, decompilers, analyzing network traffic, etc. gives the community a good chance at catching malicious updates. Mastodon admins can simply pull up your plaintext DMs on their servers and no one will ever know.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#224

Post by danabramov »

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…

> sound more like 'custom feeds' which users can define based on global content, using predefined criteria determined by a client (web app) which don't really a way to control the behavior of. Which makes this feature only truly operate on the global layer, and 'custom' rather than 'composable'.

To be clear, custom feeds aren’t defined in the client app. Anyone can run a custom feed on their own server and with arbitrary logic. A custom feed subscribes to a global firehose (which could also be run by a third party) and uses the stream of the events in the network to produce its results. A user can then publish such a feed under their account, and other users can consume it. This is essentially event sourcing.

Here’s a technical paper with details: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.03239.pdf

We’ll have more to share on composable moderation in near future.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#225

Post by Repulsion9513 »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #160
djur wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter has a lot of very right-wing posters and a lot of very left-wing posters. Which of these you're likely to see as a huge problem and which you're likely to dismiss as a few insignificant goofballs is probably going to be based on your own political orientation. It would be surprising if there hasn't been a rightward shift, though, considering that causing such was one of the current owner's explicit goals. I d…

I'm certainly willing to believe that there's been a shift. But it's completely implausible that in just a year (two? I forget how long it's been) since the sale, Twitter has transformed into a "conservative cesspool". What the poster I replied to is almost certainly seeing is that there's actual balance now, instead of being absurdly hard left like it was before.

It has never been "absurdly hard left". It was representative of the communities that used it (many of whom have been chased off by Musk).

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#228

Post by Repulsion9513 »

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.

> A central directory server collects and validates operations, and maintains a transparent log of operations for each DID.

(https://github.com/did-method-plc/did-method-plc/blob/main/R... linked from https://docs.bsky.app/blog/self-host-federation)

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#229

Post by steveklabnik »

vidarh wrote: post #202
steveklabnik wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I linked to primary sources on moderation upthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39471973 Block lists don't work at the instance level, so the answer to your question isn't just "no", but that it is impossible.

Only in the strictest sense and if you assume nobody will build graphs of interactions to use to block instead.

Sure, I was assuming "within the context of the protocol," because if we're willing to step out of that, then literally anything can happen.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#230

Post by jrm4 »

To me, the only question worth asking is the following. If a hypothetical guy, let's say his name is Melon Usk (lol) tries to buy or otherwise influence Bluesky, he's going to still mostly be able to do it with this relatively centralized moderation model, yes?

This feels like "thanks for offloading some of the data, but we still retain most of the useful control?"

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