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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

#231

Post by jamietanna »

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.

Yup, https://fed.brid.gy is one such project, and as another commenter mentions there's been a lot of discussion over the last couple of weeks. Some very good discussion, some interesting points, and a bit of unfair venting, but looks like it's moving in a good direction

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#232

Post by Repulsion9513 »

steveklabnik wrote: post #104
layer8 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-ce…

> enshittify with ads

> we'll never be able to degrade the user experience in a way where people want to leave

Neither of those is the same as "no ads". They're just saying that they can't make the ads so bad that most people want to leave, because then people will leave and the ads won't be shown to anyone.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#234

Post by medstrom »

sli wrote: post #226

This is really cool but I think "improving" social media is just going deeper into the hole. The incentives are just too perverse and hosting stuff is too expensive.

Interesting. What's this hole? I used Reddit and HN for a decade without complaint (well, the quality of Reddit nosedived a few months ago). Seems to me like they can last pretty long without perverse incentives. Bbcode forums have often been nice too.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#235

Post by xelamonster »

jakebsky wrote: post #165
mightyham wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Do…

Why do you need to open ufw if it runs in Docker? Docker does its own routing magic and will happily blast right through any ufw rules.

Very cool to see this available though, I might have to try it out later this week!

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#236

Post by Repulsion9513 »

pr337h4m wrote: post #223
Repulsion9513 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Well then I guess it's pointless because it doesn't accomplish that.

(The actual point, FYI, is that you don't have to trust all of: them, their hosting providers, your ISP, the ISPs between, the government, and their mom.)

> it is very much possible for you to know about it

"Possible" != "done"

> analyzing network traffic

How are you gonna do that? Surely if they wanted to sniff it would still just look like any other encrypted data

> gives the community a good chance at catching malicious updates

Sure, when the same application is used by everyone, which is not true in either the Mastodon world or the new Bluesky-small-instances world

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#237

Post by danpalmer »

jrm4 wrote: post #230

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?"

No. There are two components: data storage, and "indexing". You can always, feasibly, own your data. Being your own indexer is less feasible, but you'd choose one like you'd choose a Mastodon instance or something. Portability is trivial because you have the data. "Usk" buys your indexer to put ads on it, you can just move. Moderation only controls what you see on your feed, using a different indexer just means logging into a different site and seeing a slightly different set of posts.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#238

Post by DerSaidin »

DerSaidin wrote: post #205

Can a server hosting an account read all of the data belonging to that account? The feature I'd like to see from federated social network like this is encrypt everything to keys only held client side (in the style of keybase), so servers can't read content (only some surrounding metadata so they know which other servers to communicate with about the content).

> Bluesky is a public social network.

> The AT Protocol, which Bluesky is built on, is designed to support public conversations.

Ah, ok.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#239

Post by mholt »

jakebsky wrote: post #213
mholt wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Great reasons -- glad to hear that! Let me know if you encounter any hiccups or have feedback.

Love the fresh federated model btw!

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#240

Post by Repulsion9513 »

kstrauser wrote: post #215
Repulsion9513 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Public = consent for the public to see it. That includes the public on Bluesky. It was consensual. And the ruckus was in fact about Bluesky in particular. That's why the same project already supported other protocols without a big ruckus.

In general, "I want my stuff on Bluesky but don't want to deal with cross-posting to multiple different platforms and keeping up with responses on all of them"

And, "I want my stuff on whatever platform people want to read it on without having to individually approve each one" (which is quite literally the entire point of public posts on Mastodon).

OH - and it wasn't the bridge creator's decision anyway; it was the decision of people on Bluesky to follow you that would trigger your posts to be federated, so...

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