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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

#431

Post by wpietri »

dudinax wrote: post #384
haberman wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For sure. While at the same time allowing the more clever variety of abuser to sail on past.

In practice, almost any nominally "neutral" position ends up allowing an enormous amount of abuse. Which is why you'll see most platforms that start with a free-speech maximalism approach coming up with a lot of nuance and exceptions over time. And those that don't turn into cesspools.

Most people are pretty great, but moderation has to be built for the worst-case attacker.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#432

Post by steveklabnik »

vidarh wrote: post #397
steveklabnik wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, I was assuming "within the context of the protocol," because if we're willing to step out of that, then literally anything can happen.

It's a fairly safe assumption in this instance given how important these features are for people - either BlueSky will never get much traction, or people will add ways to achieve the same result. Personally, I'm not very block-happy, but I still have a few instance-wide blocks in place for my even my single-person instance on Mastodon because there are literally a few instances full of nazis, run by nazis, where bloc…

I agree that blocking is important. I just think that the framing here is very mastodon centric, and not really a thing that makes sense given how BlueSky works.

For example, due to having true account portability, if you tried to block a particular instance, they could just move to another one to evade that block. You need to block the account to prevent this. If there’s an instance that hands out usernames as a subdomain, you could write a moderation service that takes that into account, but then they could transition to their own username, stay on the same PDS, and that would no longer work.

The more BlueSky native way would be to run a moderation service that tags accounts, and then a blocklist that bans accounts that get the tag. You’d then want to tag accounts that post from that PDS, and now, even if they move, they’re still blocked.

That is to say, “you can’t really do that” doesn’t mean that that isn’t important or impossible, just that different protocols require different means of implementing requirements.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#433

Post by steveklabnik »

mariusor wrote: post #385
jakebsky wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. :)

Federation was just opened up with this announcement. I don't think there was a lot of energy for working on independent PDSes until after this has happened. In the past day, a bunch of copies of this reference PDS have been deployed. We'll see how things change in the future.

Basically, you're right, but just because you're asking early on. This is about to change real quick.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#434

Post by steveklabnik »

VHRanger wrote: post #416
torginus wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how - I'm not sure how Bluesky works but there must be moderation - otherwise the whole website would succumb to bots and gorespam, so there are people in charge who decide what you get to see. If the end result is politically unbiased, it's due to their conscious decisions, not some magic algorithm.

I think moderation is per server/community - like mastodon (or, conceptually, reddit) As opposed to centralized moderation (twitter, FB, IG, etc.)

This is not the case, moderation is decoupled from each server. Users choose how they want moderation to work, and can share those tools with others.

See here for more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39471973

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#435

Post by steveklabnik »

torginus wrote: post #411
jakebsky wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The network is designed to be "locked open" in a way that prevents this. The architecture is designed to work like the web.

You are not in control of what you see in your feed, it's the algorithm that chooses for you. So while technically all kinds of content can exist, most users will only see what's officially approved.

BlueSky literally allows for users to create their own feeds with whatever algorithms they want, and to share them with others. You can follow them as easily as you can follow an account. I'm already following several.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#436

Post by steveklabnik »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #392

Is there any good reason not to implement activity pub on top of bluesky? It seems that with all the twitter alternatives out there that are actively promoting federation as a thing, job #1 ought to be federating with each other.

See this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39471556

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#437

Post by [deleted] »

dools wrote: post #404
1shooner wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

FYI a government can’t borrow a currency it issues, there is no national debt (or all money is debt).

[deleted]

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#438

Post by nivenhuh »

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…

If I wanted to create a consumer hardware product that packages the PDS host in a user-friendly interface, does the software license permit that?

Also, services like Twitter started off with a developer friendly open API, and then it got closed off when the business needed to make money off the platform. What's the difference with Bluesky?

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#439

Post by charcircuit »

Lutger wrote: post #400
charcircuit wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if it may be simple in some areas, it doesn't handle edge cases such as https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/issues/1632 in other areas out of the box unlike other server software.

That is a bit unfair, as it is intentionally not doing so. You may disagree with it, sure, but as it stands I think your comment implies oversight or immaturity, which is evidently not the case reading the discussion on the issue you linked.

>That is a bit unfair, as it is intentionally not doing so.

That doesn't change my point. I am pointing out a an easy pitfall Caddy users can fall in since it is not automatically handled for them as it is with other server software, nor is it pointed out in the documentation fkr Caddy. Simple server software would avoid these pitfalls automatically for users. So while it now be simple to get https working, properly configuring the server is now more complex to get right.

An intentional pitfall doesn't mean it isn't a pitfall.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#440

Post by jrm4 »

danpalmer wrote: post #401
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Posts on AT are content-addressed. The feeds, as they're called now, just return content links. If "Usk" buys a feed provider it's trivial to move to another one. If you're curious why running a feed is more expensive than simply storing data, it's because you need to ingest the actual data for these links before figuring out what to serve in a feed. This storing, indexing, and aggregating is expensive.

Yeah this is my point. With X users are in a tough position because the platform sucks but they still have a huge amount of sunk cost in it. With Bluesky/AT, that doesn't exist in anywhere near the same way.

I guess the question I'm really trying to get at is "What is the worst that hypothetical Usk can do?"

I think I have a handle on it for Mastodon; the answer is "not much" or it's going to be pretty hard. While the deeply decentralized nature of Mastodon makes it harder to find a good "feed," it strongly protects against this; he'd literally have to seek out the individual instances and start trying to control them, one by one.

But it looks like Bluesky is closer to Twitter (I ain't callin' it X, idgaf) than Mastodon for purposes of what matters to a bad actor. Instances dropping off the map doesn't matter if you have a hand on the control of the relatively centralized recommendation algorithm?

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