I would like to give an update on "federation" on Bluesky.
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@mat @eniko Another thing to note. Posts on ATProto are 300 characters. The entire system is set up to mark "schema invalid" and wholly censor any post which is more than 300 characters. So what you'd have to do is put a 270 character summary of your post, plus a link to your real wordpress, into the PDS. (It's not a schema violation to contain *extra* data, so you could include a "full-text" field in the post blob, but no system in existence could read it— not even yours, you'd be publish-only)
@mat @eniko So at that point, barring building an entire alternate Bluesky-like system for reading longposts— a system which would be redundant when ActivityPub exists— you're not mirroring your WordPress on Bluesky, rather you're using Bluesky as a funny kind of RSS feed, posting a short announcement of each post there… at which point, isn't it easier to just link your WordPress to a *regular* bluesky account, and use the API to auto-post summary+announcements for new posts?
Am I making sense?
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@mat @eniko There is already such a Wordpress plugin that publishes to ActivityPub. I believe publishing a Wordpress or other blog as a PDS would be even easier than ActivityPub. All the ATP single-link APIs are very simple and almost even well documented. So the fact this sort of thing (PDS frontend to legacy data source like Wordpress) does not exist is I think a testament to the fact most people in a position to create such things take a look at, and cannot see the benefit of, ATProto interop
@mcc @eniko There are WP AT crosspost-style plugins. If you're crossposting to Bluesky from WP then you probably care about your data sovereignty. I think the demand is there if a developer took on the task. Perhaps genuine WP AP integration only exists because Matthias is so committed.
The difference between Wordpress and Friendica is that WP doesn't really require two-way communication. And that's what I don't get. I know how my posts get sent to the relay, but where are replies to those posts coming from in this setup?
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@mat @eniko So at that point, barring building an entire alternate Bluesky-like system for reading longposts— a system which would be redundant when ActivityPub exists— you're not mirroring your WordPress on Bluesky, rather you're using Bluesky as a funny kind of RSS feed, posting a short announcement of each post there… at which point, isn't it easier to just link your WordPress to a *regular* bluesky account, and use the API to auto-post summary+announcements for new posts?
Am I making sense?
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@mcc @eniko There are WP AT crosspost-style plugins. If you're crossposting to Bluesky from WP then you probably care about your data sovereignty. I think the demand is there if a developer took on the task. Perhaps genuine WP AP integration only exists because Matthias is so committed.
The difference between Wordpress and Friendica is that WP doesn't really require two-way communication. And that's what I don't get. I know how my posts get sent to the relay, but where are replies to those posts coming from in this setup?
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@mcc @eniko There are WP AT crosspost-style plugins. If you're crossposting to Bluesky from WP then you probably care about your data sovereignty. I think the demand is there if a developer took on the task. Perhaps genuine WP AP integration only exists because Matthias is so committed.
The difference between Wordpress and Friendica is that WP doesn't really require two-way communication. And that's what I don't get. I know how my posts get sent to the relay, but where are replies to those posts coming from in this setup?
@mat @eniko "but where are replies to those posts coming from in this setup?"
Short version: "You can't get them"
Long version: Currently the only ways to get replies to a post published in your Bluesky PDS are
- Run a "relay". This means (this is not a joke) receiving from Bluesky PBC a copy of literally every post made in the network, and filtering for ones that @ you.
- Log in to bsky.app (or a clone like blacksky) with your PDS username and password, and look in the notifications tab.
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@mat @eniko "but where are replies to those posts coming from in this setup?"
Short version: "You can't get them"
Long version: Currently the only ways to get replies to a post published in your Bluesky PDS are
- Run a "relay". This means (this is not a joke) receiving from Bluesky PBC a copy of literally every post made in the network, and filtering for ones that @ you.
- Log in to bsky.app (or a clone like blacksky) with your PDS username and password, and look in the notifications tab.
@mat @eniko Now, that last thing is possible, and even easy. But at that point it's really, super unclear *why* you would architect your Wordpress server to *be* a PDS, rather than running the regular PDS software on the same box, and having the Wordpress server post to it from time to time using the external API. It's extra work, but there's no obvious advantage and there's barely even a difference.
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@mcc @thisismissem @eniko ...and that reminds me of another thing!
In the spec it says "In addition to regular HTTP API endpoints, atproto supports continuous event streams." And indeed, implementing the event stream seems hard. But HTTP APIs don't sound hard. So... do PDS's have to implement both? It sounds like they don't.
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@mat @eniko Now, that last thing is possible, and even easy. But at that point it's really, super unclear *why* you would architect your Wordpress server to *be* a PDS, rather than running the regular PDS software on the same box, and having the Wordpress server post to it from time to time using the external API. It's extra work, but there's no obvious advantage and there's barely even a difference.
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@mcc @thisismissem @eniko ...and that reminds me of another thing!
In the spec it says "In addition to regular HTTP API endpoints, atproto supports continuous event streams." And indeed, implementing the event stream seems hard. But HTTP APIs don't sound hard. So... do PDS's have to implement both? It sounds like they don't.
@mat @mcc @eniko yeah, because you need sync, afaik. https://atproto.com/specs/sync
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@mcc @thisismissem @eniko ...and that reminds me of another thing!
In the spec it says "In addition to regular HTTP API endpoints, atproto supports continuous event streams." And indeed, implementing the event stream seems hard. But HTTP APIs don't sound hard. So... do PDS's have to implement both? It sounds like they don't.
@mat @thisismissem @eniko The continuous event streams are HTTP. Mine are being proxied through Apache
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@mat @thisismissem @eniko The continuous event streams are HTTP. Mine are being proxied through Apache
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@mcc I do, yeah. So it's just one part of the stack. The complicated parts come later, eh?
@tylercook Yes, correct. If you already have a setup for hosting Docker containers standing up the PDS is *trivial*. Like, you could do it in under an hour. I don't pay per byte of bandwidth (VPS) but the load from running my PDS has been so low I don't notice it. And if it turns out to be a problem you can migrate out to another PDS.
I'm going to DM you a link to a Discord I found helpful when debugging issues with my PDS.
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@thisismissem @mat @eniko Okay, yes, that's more accurate.
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@fleeky 1. Correct
2. I don't know@mcc am having a discussion of this on bsky that is helping to disambiguate :
https://bsky.app/profile/futur.blue/post/3lyuzwzb2k226
also https://github.com/zeppelin-social/bluesky-appview -
@thisismissem @mat @eniko Okay, yes, that's more accurate.
@mcc @mat @eniko so yeah, I was more saying PHP and WebSockets isn't likely to be the most pleasant time for someone. (much like Ruby and WebSockets)
But yeah, if you're suggesting a sidecar PDS to a wordpress blog that just publishes bluesky posts with a link to the wordpress post, then that'd be relatively simple. It's once you want to go beyond that that things start getting hard.
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@mcc @eniko I kinda feel like giving them the benefit of the doubt. All of these decisions can be explained by their goal of being Twitter 2.0, instant distribution to millions of people, everyone's eyeballs glued to the very latest posts as they continually fly past, desperate to respond in a way that generates traction before the world's attention fades. That's a hard problem to solve! The fact that I can't imagine why I would want it solved for me is not the point.
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Why does the "relay" matter? Well, because although Bluesky's claim is that moderation is "composable" in their system— that you can choose which moderators to follow— moderation decisions made by Bluesky are hard binding on systems they control. Someone blocked by Bluesky is blocked from the Bluesky appview, their content will get removed from the Bluesky PDS if they were using that. The Bluesky relay censors content that violates the data "schema"; I suspect (?) it enforces moderation also.
@mcc Content doesn’t get removed from the PDS it would be hidden by labels - accounts do have takedown labels applied.
Bluesky operated relay doesn’t censor Lexicons that don’t validate and it doesn’t enforce moderation.
For those following along at home the relay costs about $30/month to run for all ~38M accounts worth of content.
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@mcc Content doesn’t get removed from the PDS it would be hidden by labels - accounts do have takedown labels applied.
Bluesky operated relay doesn’t censor Lexicons that don’t validate and it doesn’t enforce moderation.
For those following along at home the relay costs about $30/month to run for all ~38M accounts worth of content.
@boris "Content doesn’t get removed from the PDS it would be hidden by labels - accounts do have takedown labels applied." I could be wrong but this seems to be contradicted by actual events over the last two weeks.
"Bluesky operated relay doesn’t censor Lexicons that don’t validate" Contradicted by my own testing. Either the relay censors them or the appview does and it comes to the same thing, because when I make 301-character posts even third party tools can't see them.
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@mcc am having a discussion of this on bsky that is helping to disambiguate :
https://bsky.app/profile/futur.blue/post/3lyuzwzb2k226
also https://github.com/zeppelin-social/bluesky-appview@fleeky As an update, I searched on blacksky.community for "from:me blackbird" and found a post from 2024. So they have some source of older posts.
