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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

#31

Post by emceestork »

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 executive and have no idea about corporate strategy, but it seems like Bluesky should focus less on technical differentiators and more on building killer features that have mass appeal and a community that people want to join.

IMHO this milestone, while cool, means absolutely nothing to people outside of the hacker news crowd.

I'm rooting for Bluesky, but it seems to me it will die without a critical mass of users.

Again, I'm kinda dumb, so this may all be wrong.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#32

Post by heroprotagonist »

I looked at the site and I see a lot of comparisons to 'old social'. But for people who might run their own node or decide to commit to the network and encourage their friends to join them, it seems your true major competitor would be projects like mastodon.

Yet there are no comparisons on the site. I don't see even see a mention. This makes it difficult to evaluate relative maturity, core competencies, limitations, and risks.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#33

Post by itsanaccount »

steveklabnik wrote: post #14
yupyup54133 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing against Bluesky, but I think we are all a little jaded after seeing decades of the "embrace, extend, extinguish" pattern.

Being jaded is understandable, but because this critique is generic, it is applicable to literally anything and everything. I don't see how you can ever get something that's considered good if you always assume it will turn into something bad regardless of its current stance.

Thats easy, you don't have a structure made with a single large actor capable of changing the rules of the game mid flight.

You get something good system by sharing power, not by once again falling for "trust us bro." You get it by understanding power imbalances and avoiding them the same way my dog avoids objects with large amounts of potential energy, because they're predictably dangerous.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#34

Post by tamimio »

jakebsky wrote: post #26
tamimio wrote: post #18

>You need to join Discord to access the feature Seriously?! Will this trend ever dies?! I don’t want to use discord, can’t they just make a simple request form? Whenever I see “join our discord” for anything in any service I just never use that service, keep it as an option for whoever wants to hangout there just don’t make it the “only” channel of communication!

This is just for a brief period during polishing/debugging since this is the first time third-party PDS hosts have been added to the network. The goal is just to help PDS operators join the network and make sure that if there's a problem we have a channel of communication open.

Bluesky has a Matrix dev group (afaik it’s an official one) why not use that too in addition to Discord (or other comms channels)?

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#35

Post by jakebsky »

jakobdabo wrote: post #27
jakebsky wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! Yes, it's totally up to a PDS operator to decide how they create user accounts. It's also not required on the Bluesky PDS service any longer, in most cases. By default the self-hosted PDS requires an invite code, to prevent random people from creating an account. Later other options will exist, including OAuth support which is coming soon.

That's great, thanks! > It's also not required on the Bluesky service any longer, in most cases. That's also nice to hear - when last time I tried to register an account (shortly after the free registration launch) the phone number field in the registration form was marked as required, if I am not mistaken.

Yeah, you're right, it was. That was temporary measure during the public launch to prevent spam/abuse. We've made some improvements here recently.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#36

Post by tamimio »

steveklabnik wrote: post #20
tamimio wrote: post #18

>You need to join Discord to access the feature Seriously?! Will this trend ever dies?! I don’t want to use discord, can’t they just make a simple request form? Whenever I see “join our discord” for anything in any service I just never use that service, keep it as an option for whoever wants to hangout there just don’t make it the “only” channel of communication!

Is that a direct quote? I don't see it anywhere. What I do see is > Because the PDS distribution is not totally settled, we want to have a line of communication with PDS admins in the network, so we’re asking any developer that plans to run a PDS to join the PDS Admins Discord. https://docs.bsky.app/blog/self-host-federation This is much more reasonable than an actual gate on the feature.

Not a direct quote. But Discord is the only means of communication.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#37

Post by Ericson2314 »

steveklabnik wrote: post #12
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.

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.

I know not the details, but all power to that developer.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#38

Post by orthecreedence »

colesantiago wrote: post #29

This is good and all but, sigh are we really celebrating letting self hosting get into the hands of bad actors to federate with Bluesky? And don’t say “lets defederate with said bad actors” since they would still exist and anyone can join said bad actors instances. It’s akin to telling antelopes surrounded by lions to close their eyes and the lions are ‘gone’ yet the lions still exist around them.

Your argument against federation and open communication is that bad people might use it? What's to stop bad people from using the main Bluesky instance?

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#39

Post by danabramov »

heroprotagonist wrote: post #32

I looked at the site and I see a lot of comparisons to 'old social'. But for people who might run their own node or decide to commit to the network and encourage their friends to join them, it seems your true major competitor would be projects like mastodon. Yet there are no comparisons on the site. I don't see even see a mention. This makes it difficult to evaluate relative maturity, core competencies, limitations,…

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.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#40

Post by Arnt »

clot27 wrote: post #24
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…

Hi, what is the status of integration with the activitypub protocol? as its currently the most popular protocol in federated social media

There's a bridge nowadays, but… see https://pleromanonx86.wordpress.com/2024/02/17/mastodon-date... which also links to https://wedistribute.org/2024/02/tear-down-walls-not-bridges... https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/14/bluesky-and-mastodon-users... and https://news.itsfoss.com/bluesky-mastodon-bridge/
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