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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

#291

Post by floren »

daredoes wrote: post #286
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…

Gonna be that guy! Any chance the team could create a Home Assistant add-on for this? https://www.home-assistant.io/addons/ I think the Home Assistant community would go WILD for being able to self-host their Bluesky data straight from home with just a few clicks. It's a pretty big crowd of people. https://analytics.home-assistant.io/ 327k willing to opt-in to analytics.

we need a new version of Zawinski's Law: every system capable of deploying plugins will eventually expand until it is a full hosting solution.

I know if there's one thing I'm eager to do it's to host even more stuff in that clunky piece of shit that has half a dozen main menu items for nonsense and buries everything of interest or value under "Settings"

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#292

Post by rglullis »

kstrauser wrote: post #284
Repulsion9513 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you share a public post on Mastodon, you are by implication licensing that content for redistribution. Because other Mastodon servers have to redistribute it in order for anyone on another instance to see it. Hope that helps you understand the basic stuff here. (Either that or every Mastodon server in existence is a massive copyright violation, which is frankly quite possible given how bad copyright law is)

I’m a sucker for a particular mix of condescending plus wrong.

Except they are not wrong. Maybe not in the specifics but in general this is exactly how AP-servers work. If you are on server A and follow someone on server B, then the posts from B will be on your server and there is absolutely no way that the "original owner" of the post on server B to remove the post from A.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#293

Post by digging »

lancelot-c wrote: post #138

Farcaster and Lens are much better alternatives than Bluesky. Not only you host your own data but you can choose your frontend and permissionlessly use the protocol backend. Web3 is the way to go for social media.

Web3 for social media? Isn't it just a crypto scam framework?

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#294

Post by Repulsion9513 »

kstrauser wrote: post #284
Repulsion9513 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you share a public post on Mastodon, you are by implication licensing that content for redistribution. Because other Mastodon servers have to redistribute it in order for anyone on another instance to see it. Hope that helps you understand the basic stuff here. (Either that or every Mastodon server in existence is a massive copyright violation, which is frankly quite possible given how bad copyright law is)

I’m a sucker for a particular mix of condescending plus wrong.

So am I, that's why I replied to the people who were condescending plus wrong :)

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#295

Post by notpushkin »

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…

I think Mastodon has a pretty good balance here – when you try to send a DM it explicitly tells you that it will not be encrypted: https://u.ale.sh/Vo1ahx.png

And the linked privacy policy goes into further detail (at least on my instance, mstdn.io):

> Please keep in mind that the _operators of the server and any receiving server may view such messages_, and that recipients may screenshot, copy or otherwise re-share them. Do not share any sensitive information over Mastodon.

Overall, I think it's safe for most chit-chat, and for anything more serious you can add link to Matrix or your email and PGP key in your profile.

As a sidenote, I'd also like to point out that a lot of serious communication nowadays still happens over unencrypted email. You can consider it whataboutism, but it's still worth remembering IMO. (And of course, like others pointed out, DMs on Twitter aren't encrypted, too, so it's the status quo here.)

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#296

Post by Repulsion9513 »

rglullis wrote: post #287
15457345234 wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

No, not "basic" stuff at all. It's not only "allowed", federation works exactly by replicating all the activities from the remote servers and even the images you share. If you don't believe it, just go ahead and see what happens when you repost a message from someone's server. The repost will come from your server, not the original creator. Or try deleting a conversation on your server and notice how the other instan…

> If you don't believe it, just go ahead and see what happens when you repost a message from someone's server

It's not just reposts. The original post itself is served to viewers by their instance, which is redistribution. (To do otherwise would actually be a massive privacy - and security - concern.)

(To be clear, media - but not the post itself - can be requested directly from the original instance, but any reputable instance will be running a proxy so that random strangers can't trivially get your IP address...)

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#297

Post by notpushkin »

eropple wrote: post #111
mvdtnz wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No video in 2024 is a total deal breaker for most users. That's insane.

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.

How does Mastodon do it?

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#298

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…

I’m a sucker for a particular mix of condescending plus wrong.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#299

Post by sneak »

archagon wrote: post #180
sneak wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the popular users subscribe to the blocklists uncritically. It breaks the UX of the site if you get placed on one.

Users are not entitled to the dissemination of their opinions. Either you let users block other users or you will turn your site into a cesspit.

No, I am talking about as a reader. If you are blocked, you cannot follow threads, even if you never post.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#300

Post by jrm4 »

danpalmer wrote: post #237
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 loggi…

I'm confused, your first word is "no," but your answer seems to suggest "yes, usk would be able to have considerable influence"

Which is to say, neither storage nor indexing -- but moderation -- the ability to have control over that would be the most important thing.

"Usk" buys (or otherwise leverages money to be able to put his thumb on the control of ) bluesky's moderation. Data storage just gives you the ability to leave? What am I missing?

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