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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

#451

Post by idiotsecant »

paulgerhardt wrote: post #243
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…

Unrelated to engineering but the recent rebrand to a dead butterfly logo[1][2][3] may be off brand for a platform wishing to communicate a more open, social Internet built on first principles and scientific rigor. [1] https://www.emilydamstra.com/please-enough-dead-butterflies/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14460013 [3] https://bsky.social/about/blog/12-21-2023-butterfly

I think the value of a symbol is in the idea it communicates. Most people don't see a dead butterfly. They just see a butterfly. The reality of whether it is more or less like a dead butterfly doesn't especially matter unless a significant amount of people interpret the symbol that way.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#452

Post by remram »

daredoes wrote: post #286
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…

Gonna be that guy! Any chance the team could create a Home Assistant add-on for this? https://www.home-assistant.io/addons/ I think the Home Assistant community would go WILD for being able to self-host their Bluesky data straight from home with just a few clicks. It's a pretty big crowd of people. https://analytics.home-assistant.io/ 327k willing to opt-in to analytics.

How would it interact with or extend home assistant?

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#453

Post by the_why_of_y »

sureglymop wrote: post #399
kouru225 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Navalny’s wife was just banned and then shadow banned. There are countless examples of leftist accounts getting banned just for being critical about Musk. It’s absolutely conservative cesspool. Nazis can are literally posting 14 words propaganda all day long and there are no consequences.

To think that Navalny or his wife are in any way leftists is insane. They were leaning more towards nationalism (just for Russia instead of the US). In the face of current events though, that can be overlooked as it is not a narrative that serves western interest. But to give an anecdote about an alternative, I rarely see any bigotry on Mastodon. Instances which allow that or don't moderate it correctly get block lis…

There are other reasons than being vocally left-wing [1] or being a journalist [2][3] that get you suspended or banned on Twitter these days.

Musk is grandstanding about "free speech", but what Twitter actually does now is fold and cave to demands for censorship from any authoritarian government that asks [4][5].

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-leaked-internal-mess...

[2] https://theintercept.com/2022/12/20/elon-musk-twitter-banned...

[3] https://www.thedailybeast.com/elon-musk-suspends-insiders-li...

[4] https://restofworld.org/2023/elon-musk-twitter-government-or...

[5] https://www.techdirt.com/2023/05/15/once-again-free-speech-a...

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#454

Post by mariusor »

steveklabnik wrote: post #433
mariusor wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sorry to be dismissive but if people need a reference PDS to implement a protocol, I kinda lose faith in its expressiveness.

I'm contrasting this through the prism of having seen people implementing ActivityPub software as early as 2017, when it was merely a draft and everyone was complaining about how many things had been left out.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#455

Post by nivenhuh »

steveklabnik wrote: post #441
nivenhuh wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

(I don't work at bluesky) It's MIT/Apache 2.0 licensed, so yes. However, because it's also an open protocol, even if it wasn't, you could write your own under whatever license you want. > What's the difference with Bluesky? BlueSky is built off of an open protocol, called AT. https://atproto.com/ BlueSky is a particular app built on the protocol. As such, there's no way to "turn off the API," as BlueSky itself is a p…

Ok, I think I understand the hype now — this is sweet? Thanks for the reply.

When I was thinking about rolling my own federated social service (during the whole Twitter / Mastodon shuffle), I started thinking about the negative impacts of federation. “How can I build a kill switch into this thing in case bad actors start to participate?”

Of course, that means a central authority having moderation control.

But then, part of me thought.. does there need to be a kill switch? Do we want centralized moderation control? If laws are being broken, or social issues are being pressed to the fringe (*lons X), then the ISP would intervene. Or… the responsibility of moderation shifts elsewhere than the provider of the software. (To where do moderation responsibilities shift, if anywhere? I think is still a question.)

I personally landed at the spot of: it’s really no different than what the WWW provides — it’s just easier access. But, is that easier access to self host content and media dangerous? (lol I guess I’m still conflicted about what could happen with wider ease-of-access to self hosting.)

… back to sleep. This stuff literally keeps me up at night lol

(I didn’t get to the other comments further down in this post that talk about content moderation .. but I’m seeing them now!)

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#456

Post by steveklabnik »

mariusor wrote: post #454
steveklabnik wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sorry to be dismissive but if people need a reference PDS to implement a protocol, I kinda lose faith in its expressiveness. I'm contrasting this through the prism of having seen people implementing ActivityPub software as early as 2017, when it was merely a draft and everyone was complaining about how many things had been left out.

There are dozens of things being built on the protocol. Just not PDSes. And it’s not because it’s difficult, but because there’s no point until there are others to try and connect to.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#457

Post by nivenhuh »

emceestork wrote: post #118
sergiotapia wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Twitter is a conservative cesspool I disagree. If anything now it's more balanced, every "right of Portland-liberal" is no longer hidden and shadow-banned or worse. I like it a lot more! Now you can actually read and learn about stuff you care about.

Yeah, maybe we just have different politics and I'm too dismissive of alternative worldviews. Still though, I get like Matt Gaetz' tweets recommended to me. Does anyone like that dude? How is this happening? Why on earth would I want that? I feel like all this conservative stuff is surfaced by the application to me. [Proof]( https://ibb.co/ypHS8fN ) I got notifications, on my dang phone, for the dumbest fucking takes…

It’s not just you. I echo your sentiments.

I use Twitter for tech, but my feed is now conservative politics, gore video, & tech tweets intermingled.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#458

Post by mariusor »

steveklabnik wrote: post #456
mariusor wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to be dismissive but if people need a reference PDS to implement a protocol, I kinda lose faith in its expressiveness. I'm contrasting this through the prism of having seen people implementing ActivityPub software as early as 2017, when it was merely a draft and everyone was complaining about how many things had been left out.

There are dozens of things being built on the protocol. Just not PDSes. And it’s not because it’s difficult, but because there’s no point until there are others to try and connect to.

Sorry, I feel like I'm not getting my point across: if building independent software that implements a "federated" protocol doesn't give you a "PDS" then the protocol has failed. You shouldn't need a reference implementation to do it, you should be able to federate with multiple instances of your own software or with other independent implementers.

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#459

Post by vidarh »

dotnet00 wrote: post #257
vidarh wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet you can be on Mastodon and just never bother to pay attention to any of that drama and your life will barely be affected by it. The cliques are mostly important to those who choose to make it important for themselves.

Yeah, that's what I do, was just pointing out that the loudest mastodon users are like.

The beauty of Mastodon is that if you pick your instance carefully, most of that noise doesn't necessarily even make it to your instance, much less your feed ...

Re: Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

#460

Post by Angostura »

icehawk wrote: post #328
Angostura wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

...on a server that speaks ActivityPub. Mastodon is one such piece of software.

Yup, thank you for the correction
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