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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

#371

Post by charcircuit »

napkin wrote: post #370
charcircuit wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I just want to properly handle this edge case and it would bother me if my sites didn't handle it correctly. There are advantages for using FQDNs since they are not ambiguous there are extra optimizations that can be done. I don't want my sites to be problematic for people who want to use them so I make sure my sites properly handle them. Usually handling FQDNs is easy as it just works out if the box on m…

Can you provide a URL to a page containing a link of this style? I’ll concede that it’s useful to someone if I see it! The term ‘FQDN’ does not always imply the dot at the end?

Do you just want a link?

https://news.ycombinator.com./

If you want a link to a page with a link like this you can click on the github issue I referenced in my original comment as there are links there like that.

If you want a more natural page that is less meta with such a link

https://jameswillia.ms/posts/shortest-urls.html

>Also, the term ‘FQDN’ does not always imply the dot at the end?

Yes, but if there is not a . at the end then there is ambiguity of if it is a FQDN or not.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#372

Post by wpietri »

haberman wrote: post #369
wpietri wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no "true neutral" when it comes to moderation. There are a million examples, but the most obvious are of the form "you can have group X or people who hate group X and are dedicated to driving them off the platform". Somebody's not going to have "free speech" in that case. And even if you go for what most "true neutral" advocates want, which is a lack of rules, you'll quickly find that quite a lot of people d…

True neutral means moderating consistently, judging behavior without regard to identity. The ideal, platonic version of this would be that moderators only see an "identity scrambled" version of each tweet/post when they make their moderation decision. Like a screen that blinds orchestra musicians when they audition, the human would see a statement like "I hate New Yorkers" and not know if the original message said "I…

That sounds like a very personal definition of "true neutral". And also an unworkable one.

Take the use of reclaimed slurs, for example. When used against the discriminated group by a dominant group, their intention is often to cause harm. When used within the group, the intention is to reappropriate the term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reappropriation

Similarly, harassers will use terms in ways that are plausibly read different ways depending on who they're talking to. So something that might sound innocuous or just odd when directed at me will be correctly read as a racist attack when directed at somebody else.

And that's not even counting when they'll just come up with new terms so they can be awful in ways that are novel enough that automated filters or out-of-date moderators won't catch. E.g.: https://www.vice.com/en/article/bv88a5/white-supremacists-ha...

In short, because there's a great deal of identity-based hate in the world, identity-blind moderation ends up being an aid to the identity haters out there.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#373

Post by Dylan16807 »

eropple wrote: post #280
Choco31415 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> It's not storage, it's bandwidth.

A size limit affects both equally.

> even relatively good ones like Cloudflare have particular payment shenanigans around video

That's only for the web service. Workers and R2 let you do video just fine. And small videos don't need any fancy logic, just toss them over http.

> 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?

No, I legitimately don't know. Why is it different from an image that gets a million views?

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#374

Post by hackernewds »

celdon25 wrote: post #285
elpool2 wrote: 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.

truly neutral = post anything? there exist such platforms and they're cesspools because human nature

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#375

Post by haberman »

wpietri wrote: post #372
haberman wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True neutral means moderating consistently, judging behavior without regard to identity. The ideal, platonic version of this would be that moderators only see an "identity scrambled" version of each tweet/post when they make their moderation decision. Like a screen that blinds orchestra musicians when they audition, the human would see a statement like "I hate New Yorkers" and not know if the original message said "I…

That sounds like a very personal definition of "true neutral". And also an unworkable one. Take the use of reclaimed slurs, for example. When used against the discriminated group by a dominant group, their intention is often to cause harm. When used within the group, the intention is to reappropriate the term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reappropriation Similarly, harassers will use terms in ways that are plausibly…

The element of moderation that you consider essential -- the latitude to apply subjective judgments that rely on knowing the specific identities of the participants -- is precisely the element that I do not trust moderators to perform.

That this moderation strategy would prevent the use of all slurs (even reappropriated ones) sounds like a feature to me, not a bug.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#376

Post by cabalamat »

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…

> Consent is a thing and this wasn't consensual

The whole point of a fediverse is it's a federation. Therefore there is implied consent to copying from one instance to another.

> but the intent of posting to Mastodon isn't to have it show up automatically on another network

Mastodon isn't a network, the network is the fediverse. Mastodon is some software that runs on the network.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#378

Post by slily »

zackify wrote: post #326
crossroadsguy wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The invite link is in the blog post. Assuming anyone can go to it after joining. In the example I just hard code the env variables to demonstrate, but you’d want them in secrets after testing it out.

In case you are unaware, it's considered poor etiquette to share links to login-walled social networks, and something like Discord that forces you to join a chatroom with unknown implications (it may trigger a message drawing attention to you, it may require account verification, it may require manual action from a moderator, etc.) just to access some information, all that on top of requiring an account to view anything, is far worse. You can easily share information through one of the countless Pastebin clones out there.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#379

Post by KerrAvon »

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…

[flagged]

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#380

Post by jillesvangurp »

I'm happy to see they dropped phone verification via SMS. I was critical about it a few weeks ago because 1) it's a dumb thing to do in 2024 and 2) it didn't actually work for me (they were trying to be too clever with German phone numbers and I couldn't get past their broken validation). I just signed up without that nonsense and it worked.

Thank you! Great to see companies taking feedback seriously.

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