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Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

bsky.social

311–320 of 471 posts

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#311
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think everything you said was fair, but you also mentioned Twitter being a conservative cesspool, and a lot these features like federation and composable moderation are designed to help prevent the whole "rich guy buys the company and turns it into something you don't like" scenario.

It's really unfortunate that the tech companies set the precedent in the first place by pushing hard political agendas into their policies and moderation biases. If it was truly neutral in the first place we would not be having this conversation. All the people complaining only now about Twitter doing this are part of the problem.

Of course people are going to complain about content they don't want. That's the product. Twitter changed their product to deliver different content, so its audience has changed.

Calling it 'The Problem' like climate change or the national debt gives it too much power. Just use something else. People use group chats for real relationships now anyway.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You have nailed it. Bluesky weirdly tries to omit that as much as they can, but they do admit in their protocol descriptions that everything goes through and depends on a central server with absolute power. They also mention that anyone can run another of these, but there is zero chance anyone will be able to do that.

> "They also mention that anyone can run another of these, but there is zero chance anyone will be able to do that."

This is an odd claim since it's completely possible today and has always has been.

Each Bluesky Relay and PDS host has endpoints that anyone can use to receive network data (post/like records, etc) in a totally permissionless way.

A Relay:

    websocat wss://bsky.network/xrpc/com.atproto.sync.subscribeRepos
A PDS

    websocat wss://puffball.us-east.host.bsky.network/xrpc/com.atproto.sync.subscribeRepos
And there are additional sync methods as well for doing backfill, etc. Not sure how this could be more open.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#313

When is this going to support IPv6-only hosting? Would've loved to set up an instance to mess around with but requiring IPv4 is a showstopper for folks behind CGNAT (i.e. most people on earth).

CGNAT is for IPv4, so users can share IPs. It's pretty hard to use the internet without IPv4 access today, so it's not that much of a limitation.

But we do certainly plan to make IPv6 work on all our network services.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#314
post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

wtf. The problem with censorship is censors are subservient to his nation and don't get to pick victims at his will? "demonstrates ... that they can expect there to be actual consequences" ? You really must hate the concept of a modern nation and social contract.

Post 18th century world started with peasants beheading kings and gutting his body into pieces so no single individual shall have any meaningful parts of it. The fact that kings had the power to throw anyone out of "his" club, deemed no longer his simply by volume of peasants within, at his king's discretion without the newly established ultrabureaucratic people's approval processes, was the problem they had enough of.

I'm not even sure in which part in the history of humanity your definition of free speech and censorship problems could come from. I don't think even ancient Roman Senate honored that kind of view as I've never heard they held sessions with bags of stones around. That isn't an anarchist view either, since it will lead to their minority views alone justify such "consequences".

Just wtf?

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#315

10 months later, this description of Bluesky is still accurate: https://fiatjaf.com/ab1127fb.html

In fact, it's mostly inaccurate.

> "the protocol has an official webpage with a waitlist and a private beta?"

Both the waitlist and the private beta are gone.

> "The “protocol” is just a description of whatever the Bluesky app and servers do, it can and does change anytime the Bluesky developers decide they want to change it"

1. atproto is well documented and the plan and desire is to make it a proper internet standard.

2. There are hundreds of independent projects relying on the protocol to create alternative clients and custom feeds (algorithms).

3. The protocol includes namespaced schemas so that different apps can evolve without breaking each other e.g. the "app.bsky" namespace is for the Bluesky microblogging app.

> "The “DID Placeholder” method..."

There is already support for did:web and plans to support other DID methods, including potentially (non-POW) blockchain methods.

> "All posts go through the Bluesky central server..."

All posts go through any Relay that anyone cares to operate. It's also possible to fetch posts directly form the origin PDS host, it's just slower and results in more load on the PDS.

> "And you, as a reader, doesn’t have any control of what you’re reading from either..."

Apps are in full control over where they get posts from. An app can enable users to select a Relay/AppView or fetch posts directly from the origin PDS.

> "But I fail to see why even more than one network provider will exist,..."

People may want to operate their own Relay/AppView services so they have more control for their specific application, for higher performance (latency/throughput) reasons, or for geographic/jurisdictional reasons, to name a few.

And the compute/network requirements are not beyond the capabilities of small startups, non-profits, coops, or public services and likely never will be.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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)

> When you share a public post on Mastodon, you are by implication licensing that content for redistribution….

… on Mastodon

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#318
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

That was quit the mess. Ryan Barrett is a smart guy and seems quite nice, but it was very ill-advised to unilaterally decide to build an opt-out bridge. In general, if users one platform A want their stuff to be on platform B, they'll find a way to make that happen. If someone else takes it upon themselves to copy everything from A to B, people understandably get pretty bent about it. If it had been an opt-in system,…

I'm surprised that the tool in question is Bridgy Fed. Bridgy Fed has existed for a long time and is a very useful tool. Its alternative, Bridgy, has also been used to bridge between closed social networks and the open IndieWeb.

Why are Fediverse people only angry about it now? It's an open protocol. If you want privacy, don't publish something for the entire world to see. That's just basic common sense. At the very least, use Mastodon's privacy controls. The Fediverse is not special here, it doesn't get to destroy the open Web for everyone else.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#319

I just got this setup using Docker on https://fly.io . It's running with wayyyy less resources than the github suggested. I am on a shared cpu with 512mb of ram running the container. Could be a little simpler to setup, if the docs provided a docker run example without the shell scripts. Also has some duplicate env variables. For anyone interested, I shared it in the discord: https://discord.com/channels/120702437954…

You have shared a discord link. Does it allow publicly accessible links now? I was shown a login/signup screen.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#320

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?

Then people are going to link to YouTube and benefit of getting lesser copies is small. The rest of media that works within a limit on a microblogging are junk.
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