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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

#381

Post by Reptur »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #380

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.

Agreed, not to mention phone numbers can easily be used by entities to ID anyone's account which has a chilling effect on freedom of expression.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#383

Post by r721 »

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.

Why do Farcaster proponents never mention that it's not free in their pitches?

>To sign up, users must pay a $5 sign-up fee, meant to prevent the creation of spam accounts. Further, users can only post a limited number of “casts” on Farcaster apps, which are tied to packages called storage units. Storage units, which go for $5 a piece, grant a user 5,000 casts, 2,500 reactions, and 2,500 links or photo posts within a one-year period.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#384

Post by dudinax »

haberman wrote: post #375
wpietri wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

You're proposing erring on the side of censorship to avoid some gray areas. While this is a reasonable position, it doesn't satisfy some ideal of neutrality and won't really avoid the gray areas, and so still would require subjective judgement.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#385

Post by mariusor »

jakebsky wrote: post #169
mariusor wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any independent projects implementing the AT protocol?

There are a number of independent projects using atproto in various ways. There's an (incomplete) list here: https://docs.bsky.app/showcase And the protocol is documented here: https://atproto.com

Thank you, I might be searching for the wrong things, but I don't see any independent servers. There's clients, libraries, bots, but no servers, am I missing something?

My question was motivated by the fact that from the outside the AT proto ecosystem looks pretty monocultural, and personally I don't trust that. :)

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#387

Post by consumer451 »

kstrauser wrote: post #209
steveklabnik wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, please keep in mind that this is my perception of others' arguments, and so may have some bias. I am going to try and counteract that with my wording here, but maybe someone who holds this position can drop by and give their own summary. I have seen two main complaints: * This is opt-out not opt-in, and I don't like that. * BlueSky is bad because it is run by a company (sometimes with a suggestion that Jack Do…

In my experience, the former was the majority of the complaints. The common sentiment I saw boiled down to "if I wanted my posts to be on Bluesky, I'd have posted them there." I agree with that completely. It wasn't so much that it was Bluesky in particular, as that someone made an opt-out system that would re-publish all their content elsewhere.

It is worth noting that being indexed by Google is also opt-out on Mastodon.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#388

Post by pwdisswordfishc »

unshavedyak wrote: post #105
sangnoir wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the AT protocol is superior in your opinion?

I don't know enough about it to give feedback. However Martin Kleppmann's[1] involvement is a huge selling point to me. It's also, seemingly, good enough that they're building very useful things on top of it like PDS, migrating users, etc. ActivityPub (AP) felt a bit like "good enough to get something done", which is amazing on one hand - people can do a lot with it. But it also means some harder problems are totally…

> I don't know enough about it to give feedback. However Martin Kleppmann's[1] involvement is a huge selling point to me.

Oh, so it's just hype.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#389

Post by ibz »

busymom0 wrote: post #131

Does anyone know how this differs from the Nostr protocol?

Nostr is relays + clients.

BlueSky is PDS + relays + clients.

If you look at the history of Nostr and try to really understand the protocol, where it came from and what it was trying to solve, Nostr was also meant to work on a PDS + relay model, except it degenerated to the point where most Nostr app developers are simply writing Javascript browser apps that use relays as a "poor man's cloud", sort of, without any consideration for achieving self-sovereignty of the user.

"I save the data in the 6 most popular Nostr relays and done." is what 99% of the so called "Nostr apps" do. Sounds good in theory, until it is not. Relays were really meant to be treated as ephemeral actors, that come and go, and data was meant to be stored somewhere the user was in control of, but instead, relays are treated as some sort of reincarnation of IPFS, where you save your data and have it safe forever.

Bluesky seems to solve this by introducing the concept of PDS. It's not like PDSes cannot be built for Nostr - there are indeed some Nostr apps that work using the PDS model - save the data in a place the user has complete control of, and then propagate it to relays. The benefit of Bluesky seems to me that it formalizes the concept of PDSes, so that app developers don't have to think about it and cannot mistake the relays for PDSes.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#390

Post by Repulsion9513 »

Angostura wrote: post #317
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)

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

The common term for the network formed by software speaking ActivityPub is "Mastodon", despite that formally being the name of a single piece of that software. Do you also have a problem with Pleroma or Akkoma or whatever? If not then this isn't relevant.
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