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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

#421

Post by overstay8930 »

jakebsky wrote: post #313
overstay8930 wrote: post #148

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.

That’s… not what I said. If you want other people to host services (like to federate), it’s going to be pretty impossible for the vast majority of people to actually do it if you only allow IPv4 connections.

You cannot federate behind CGNAT, and most folks can only open ports over IPv6, because they don’t live in America where everyone can get their own public IPv4 address. This is a pretty big miss IMO.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#422

Post by NoGravitas »

CaptainFever wrote: post #318
kstrauser wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In general, people on the Fediverse want to be able to make local moderation decisions; the way that extends to other federated sites is by not federating with them. Most Fediverse sites will not federate with sites that have bad or nonexistent moderation (or simply incompatible moderation policies). Bluesky's architecture basically means that it is one big unmoderated site. The normal reaction of Fediverse admins is then to block it.

As a controversy, it's been blown out of proportion. It's just Fediverse admins setting the moderation policies for their own sites, as always.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#423

Post by NoGravitas »

Repulsion9513 wrote: post #207
kstrauser wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Public is public. And someone else will just go build an opt-out (or maybe even no opt-out!) bridge.

And Fediverse admins will block that bridge, just like they would any other site with bad/nonexistent moderation, and will advise each other to block it. That's just how moderation works in the Fediverse. I guess it's sad that, unlike the admin of an instance with bad moderation, the bridge operator can't do anything to fix the problem, but in the end, that's their problem.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#424

Post by NoGravitas »

Arnt wrote: post #395
kstrauser wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What thing is consent? Mastodon is an odd sort of network, there's more blocking than I expected and it somehow seems as if blocking is an intrinsic part of the design. In Mastodon, blocking looks like a choice one makes for whatever reasons, not an unloved measure needed for fighting abuse. As if the design doesn't tell users "you can follow people in the fediverse" but rather "your ability to follow people in the f…

> what makes bluesky different from some unvetted mastodon site run by weird people?

Absolutely nothing! Fediverse admins block unmoderated sites all the time, for being unmoderated. Bluesky is just, effectively, one unmoderated instance that everyone will block by default.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#425

Post by lolinder »

doublerabbit wrote: post #67
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…

Will this work for bare metal? I use BSD, and all I see is a installer for Debian/Ubuntu. No guide in sight for bare metal nor telling you what services/software are required.

Look into the service folder in the repo—this repo is just a very thin packaging wrapper for a JS library, which you should be able to run anywhere you can run Node.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#426

Post by unshavedyak »

pwdisswordfishc wrote: post #388
unshavedyak wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's interest, yes. Notably because the existing solution (AP) has been a negative to me.

Not sure how you call that hype. Is everything hype until you understand it well to you?

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#427

Post by jakebsky »

overstay8930 wrote: post #421
jakebsky wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s… not what I said. If you want other people to host services (like to federate), it’s going to be pretty impossible for the vast majority of people to actually do it if you only allow IPv4 connections. You cannot federate behind CGNAT, and most folks can only open ports over IPv6, because they don’t live in America where everyone can get their own public IPv4 address. This is a pretty big miss IMO.

Okay, I get what you're saying. Yes, hosting a PDS server behind NAT is a problem.

1. The expected scenario is that people would run PDS hosts on small VMs (Digital Ocean, Vultr, AWS, etc) where an IPv4 address is the default.

2. People running PDS hosts behind NAT would use a tunnel service of some kind (Cloudflare Tunnel, Tailscale Funnel, Ngrok, etc).

But IPv6 is something we do want to support, and it won't be a huge effort. It will just take a bit of time to get to it.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#429

Post by jakebsky »

grey_earthling wrote: post #405
wmf wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bluesky doesn't have "instances", it has PDSes, Relays, and AppViews. People can run their own PDSes but PDSes are kind of invisible so you won't "see" them. You'll just see the whole Bluesky network as usual.

What I mean is: where is the website other than bsky.app where I can see content from the network?

The bsky.app web app is a JavaScript app that runs in a browser. It talks to an AppView (API server) which talks to a Relay which talks to all PDS hosts on the network.

There are other clients for Bluesky that do the same thing as the bsky.app web app: https://docs.bsky.app/showcase?tags=client

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#430

Post by jakebsky »

ineedaj0b wrote: post #339

What happens when the bots show up? Do they have anything to defend against that?

Yes, we have an "AutoMod" system and other protections in place. But it is a cat-and-mouse game, so we expect it to be one of the challenges. But because the network is completely open, it's also something anyone who is interested can help with.
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