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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

#271

Post by r14c »

vidarh wrote: post #212
r14c wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Blu…

Just in practical terms, global bridges will see extremely high traffic if they become popular. I've watched people struggle to maintain operational bridges for single high-traffic channels. Not to mention the hosting cost of being a single point of failure for inter-network translation.

I think the future of decentralized social media is bright. I'm critically supportive of all the work being done and I'll be happy as long as we don't repeat the mistakes of email and xmpp.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#272

Post by r14c »

jamietanna wrote: post #231
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

Global bridges like this are single points of failure that defeat the purpose of decentralization. I'm saying that individual nodes should be full participants on all of the networks they want to communicate with. I don't have an issue with whatever they're trying to accomplish, but I've seen how hard it is to maintain stable high-traffic bridges.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#273

Post by r14c »

rakoo wrote: post #21
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.

That's Friendica. Bluesky apparently will be available in next release

Friendica is always doing the good work.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#274

Post by hnbad »

numpad0 wrote: post #163
j-james wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 leas…

Communities are built on shared values and expectations of what is or isn't acceptable conduct. If a guest to your club house starts pooping on the carpet, you throw them out not only because you don't want that to happen in your club house but also because throwing them out demonstrates to the other people in your club house that they can expect there to be actual consequences to that kind of behavior, allowing them to feel safe knowing that they won't have to worry about it. Bluesky's solution apparently boils down to just telling everyone to ignore the poop guy and giving them the option to not be able to see him.

The problem with censorship isn't the enforcement of rules. The problem with censorship is the enforcement of rules the individual that has to enforce them doesn't agree with. Free speech absolutism on social media is often argued for with appeals to "the town square" but the difference between social media and an actual town square is that if you make a complete ass out of yourself in an actual town square, eventually someone will punch you.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#275

Post by charcircuit »

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…

Even if it may be simple in some areas, it doesn't handle edge cases such as https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/issues/1632 in other areas out of the box unlike other server software.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#276

Post by sfink »

mvdtnz wrote: post #127
eropple wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Video is also prohibitively expensive outside of Google-scale endeavors and will likely crush both third-party BGSes and PDSes. Everyone doing video is either selling you ads (whether it's in that video or around it), selling you the video itself, or is losing money. Possibly all three. As it is, og-embeds do work for video and audio from a few different providers.

Great. But without video you lose most of your users.

I am increasingly of the mind that this is a feature, not a bug.

If you want to be Twitter, you'll end up being Twitter. We already have one of those, it sucks, and we don't need another one.

Social networks go to crap above a certain scale. If everyone can see your posts, you'll write posts to be seen by everyone. Which, as it turns out, ends up benefiting no one. The magic comes when there is a community, where you give a shit about the people you're sending messages to, and they give a shit about you. If the community is too small, then nobody bothers with it and it dies. If the community is too large, then it ends up being old men screaming at clouds, and (see above) we already have one of those. So a platform that is good enough to use, but limits the number of disaffected members, is the only thing worth creating.

If something I'm saying requires a video, then I can always link to one. If something someone else is saying requires a video, and it requires the video to be immediately visible while I'm reading whatever they're saying, then there's a good chance I'm better off not seeing it anyway, even if I think I want to.

(Ironically, in this post I am an old man screaming at clouds...)

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#277

Post by hnbad »

riffic wrote: post #258
hnbad wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 vi…

managed hosting perhaps? It works in the email industry at least (Google and Microsoft nearly dominate the email biz)

Yeah but that assumes ATP reaches anything even remotely approximating the ubiquity of email rather than ending up like Google Wave (not literally by being handed off to Apache - which took Wave behind the barn in 2018 in case you're wondering what happened to it).

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#278

Post by stevenicr »

So what data goes and what data is blocked by transitioning away from the main server?

I am assuming a person's own posts would come along, but what about conversations with other people, or group discussions or things you have followed?

Any other features that would work / things you could see if still connected but no be available if you were federated and banned?

I think fbook has a hidden 'export your posts to WP' option somewhere, and you can download a copy of your data (if you are not banned / can still login) - but that data would not include replies in groups, marketplace, etc (? haven't checked, I'm sure other things)

I read they were turning off the groups access API and may not be offering a replacement option..

I think there is reasonable debate as to whether or not group posts and such should or should not be included in a data dump / backup..

Also not familiar with features that bluesky or mastadon or twitter do or do not have and what would break if you moved your data (would only your part of dms/chats come along? pictures others sent you or posted? )

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#279

Post by troad »

dustedcodes wrote: post #247
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]

Demonstrably false - elder hippies are a hoot.

But more importantly, a bit rich for someone still caught up in the left-right dichotomy to be telling others to wise up.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#280

Post by eropple »

Choco31415 wrote: post #254
eropple wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Video is also prohibitively expensive outside of Google-scale endeavors and will likely crush both third-party BGSes and PDSes. Everyone doing video is either selling you ads (whether it's in that video or around it), selling you the video itself, or is losing money. Possibly all three. As it is, og-embeds do work for video and audio from a few different providers.

If storage is a problem, couldn’t Blusky add a size limit to video uploads?

It's not storage, it's bandwidth. Most system providers, for Bad Reasons, charge a lot for egress; even relatively good ones like Cloudflare have particular payment shenanigans around video. Size uploads could help in that situation, but it's a bandaid on a bullet wound when the video still gets played a million times, y'know?
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