I would like to give an update on "federation" on Bluesky.
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@aeva "Tower", that's a good word for it.
I think observably, the fact blacksky exists as a full stack (or at least end to end) example *is* inspiring more towers to stand up, and I'd put northsky as the example. (Or so I assume, I don't know for a fact the order of events.)
@aeva The question as always with ATP though is "why?". That is *why* would anyone bother splitting from bluesky. What we've seen so far is two demographic communities with reasons to distrust platforms they don't operate themselves.
So like who else would bother? You wouldn't see like, a fishing community standing up their own tower because they have no reason to expect Bluesky will target them specifically, and it costs so much more than running a Mastodon instance.
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@mcc it's a client (aka app) that uses an appview -- currently the Bluesky appview
@jdp23 oh dear.
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@aeva The question as always with ATP though is "why?". That is *why* would anyone bother splitting from bluesky. What we've seen so far is two demographic communities with reasons to distrust platforms they don't operate themselves.
So like who else would bother? You wouldn't see like, a fishing community standing up their own tower because they have no reason to expect Bluesky will target them specifically, and it costs so much more than running a Mastodon instance.
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@mcc I'm curious, but I haven't had any time to look into this, so if you know off the top of your head, cost aside, how much work/knowledge does it take to stand up the whole stack at this point? Does Blacksky, for example, or Northsky, have their software available and documented? I think that it would be fun to try to try, but I have limited time and this isn't really my specialization.
@alter_kaker @mcc hmm, apparently not that much knowledge is required, and the cost dropped significantly, I still don't trust any of it though
A Full-Network Relay for $34 a Month | bryan newbold (🇪🇺Europa again)
This is an update to a Summer 2024 blog post. At the time, atproto relays required a cache of the full network on local disk to validate data structures. With the Sync v1.1 updates, relays don't need all that disk I/O. What impact does that have on hosting setup and operating costs? Turns out the d...
(whtwnd.com)
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@aeva The question as always with ATP though is "why?". That is *why* would anyone bother splitting from bluesky. What we've seen so far is two demographic communities with reasons to distrust platforms they don't operate themselves.
So like who else would bother? You wouldn't see like, a fishing community standing up their own tower because they have no reason to expect Bluesky will target them specifically, and it costs so much more than running a Mastodon instance.
@mcc @aeva I continue to be annoyed that whenever anyone brings up legitimate gripes with how bsky is operated, the staff claim "open protocol", "federation", and "user freedom", when the reality is that with only a handful of alternate towers that represent maybe a single digit percentage of users at best, for all intents and purposes it is not federated in any way that brings meaningful choice to the average user.
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@cthos @aeva I don't have an answer to this question. I've seen various claimed attempts to ballpark this number, but I expect it will change month to month, so even if I trusted the numbers I saw (I don't) there's no guarantee they're still accurate.
The Big Problem as I see it is since every "tower" contains the entire network, if the amount of traffic on bluesky doubles, the operating costs of each tower doubles. The "oh shit this is harder than I thought" problem is even worse than fedi.
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@cthos @aeva I don't have an answer to this question. I've seen various claimed attempts to ballpark this number, but I expect it will change month to month, so even if I trusted the numbers I saw (I don't) there's no guarantee they're still accurate.
The Big Problem as I see it is since every "tower" contains the entire network, if the amount of traffic on bluesky doubles, the operating costs of each tower doubles. The "oh shit this is harder than I thought" problem is even worse than fedi.
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@mcc @aeva I continue to be annoyed that whenever anyone brings up legitimate gripes with how bsky is operated, the staff claim "open protocol", "federation", and "user freedom", when the reality is that with only a handful of alternate towers that represent maybe a single digit percentage of users at best, for all intents and purposes it is not federated in any way that brings meaningful choice to the average user.
because #bluesky operates on the #cryptoBro credo (since bluesky is run by crypto bros)
in #crypto, the con is:
1. promise a lot
2. don't deliver
3. but nevertheless generate adoring devotion off of the promisethis works like gangbusters
because people want to believe. they even get defensive and angry when you point out promise vs reality
it's a hack of human psychology
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@mcc @aeva I continue to be annoyed that whenever anyone brings up legitimate gripes with how bsky is operated, the staff claim "open protocol", "federation", and "user freedom", when the reality is that with only a handful of alternate towers that represent maybe a single digit percentage of users at best, for all intents and purposes it is not federated in any way that brings meaningful choice to the average user.
@swetland @aeva Yeah. I am using the exact alternate infrastructure that the bluesky reps point to as proof their system works. And I *still* cannot tell, if Bluesky banned someone and Blacksky disagrees with the ban, if I would be able to see that person's posts or not. In response to this thread I've had one person tell me I'm underestimating Blacksky's stack coverage and another tell me I'm overestimating it.
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@jdp23 oh dear.
@mcc well, it's incremental implementation. Having their own client lets them make different blocking decisions from Bluesky, so is useful in its own right even though it doesn't get all the way there. The real value of the appview will kick in once it's got the equivalent of local-only posts.
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@aeva @cthos either you rely on bluesky to get the content (meaning you have to trust them to convey the content) or you prepare and mirror the content yourself. No real third option, fundamentally. If there were several blacksky-like towers then they could potentially pool resources, but no other actor has gotten as far as blacksky so there's no one to pool with.
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@mcc well, it's incremental implementation. Having their own client lets them make different blocking decisions from Bluesky, so is useful in its own right even though it doesn't get all the way there. The real value of the appview will kick in once it's got the equivalent of local-only posts.
@jdp23 "Having their own client lets them make different blocking decisions from Bluesky"
How?
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@mcc Bluesky is a venture capital shit show in the making. The rug pull will happen in the next decade.
I did not know about the fighting between black devs and the queer community.??? What is the lore there.
Cuz it sux that they went the way of atproto over activity pub.
this is the ticking time bomb
venture capital has sunk a big investment in bluesky, and at some point they are going to ask for a return
and then bluesky goes the way of twitter
"black fedi vs queer fedi" is mostly confined to a few notable drama ego characters
it's not devouring communities, there's plenty of black folk and queer folk on the fediverse completely untouched by it
but drama *is* drama
it does drive people away
and the bullying is real
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@jdp23 "Having their own client lets them make different blocking decisions from Bluesky"
How?
@mcc Blocks are "enforced" at the client level. I know, I know, that probably merits another "oh dear" but that's how Bluesky is doing it. So blacksky.community as a client doesn't do age verification for DMs in the UK, or block access to Mississippi.
Takedowns by contrast are at the AppView and someties PDS level.
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@GroupNebula563 @mcc Would be nice! Won't happen though.
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@mcc @gbargoud It would seem like maybe this could be mitigated a bit by a (hosted) service that operates a filtered relay feed -- which drinks from the full network firehose, but lets downstream users small instances/servers subscribe to a subset view of that (based on accounts/hashtags/filters to observe).
@swetland that is pretty much the intention of the ATmosphere's design. The vision of this "composable moderation" is to allow independent "labeller" or filter services be able to process the firehose of relay traffic.
I do find the atmosphere approach interesting but its "service oriented" design seems to fight against the nature (or original intentions at least) of the host-centric internet we all try to navigate.
I think that, if reasonableness prevails, ATproto and ActivityPub will end up cross pollinating ideas and resembling each other more. Oddly enough they are both hobbled by the same problem to some degree...the dominance of a single entity hampering the true potential each has (Bluesky and Mastodon or at least Gargron's Big Instances).
One thing is pretty certain at least... The dominant platform within the fediverse driving certain communities away was a more significant factor in why Bluesky gained traction than any technical design decisions either network made.
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@alter_kaker @mcc hmm, apparently not that much knowledge is required, and the cost dropped significantly, I still don't trust any of it though
A Full-Network Relay for $34 a Month | bryan newbold (🇪🇺Europa again)
This is an update to a Summer 2024 blog post. At the time, atproto relays required a cache of the full network on local disk to validate data structures. With the Sync v1.1 updates, relays don't need all that disk I/O. What impact does that have on hosting setup and operating costs? Turns out the d...
(whtwnd.com)
@esoteric_programmer so this is all within my ability. But what about the rest of the stack? To my understanding, the PDS and view? As @mcc says things have to change in a social level but the first step is more nodes...
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@swetland that is pretty much the intention of the ATmosphere's design. The vision of this "composable moderation" is to allow independent "labeller" or filter services be able to process the firehose of relay traffic.
I do find the atmosphere approach interesting but its "service oriented" design seems to fight against the nature (or original intentions at least) of the host-centric internet we all try to navigate.
I think that, if reasonableness prevails, ATproto and ActivityPub will end up cross pollinating ideas and resembling each other more. Oddly enough they are both hobbled by the same problem to some degree...the dominance of a single entity hampering the true potential each has (Bluesky and Mastodon or at least Gargron's Big Instances).
One thing is pretty certain at least... The dominant platform within the fediverse driving certain communities away was a more significant factor in why Bluesky gained traction than any technical design decisions either network made.
@msh @swetland @gbargoud From what I see, some communities were driven away by community issues, others (im thinking indie gamedev Twitter and comics artists) just couldn't navigate the additional friction of Mastodon's model. It wasn't all one thing. And I doubt you can chalk up the community issues to just one server, or at least, if there were one server I don't think it would be mastodon dot social (I have an instance in mind but don't feel like naming names)
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I would like to give an update on "federation" on Bluesky.
My expectation was it was unlikely we'd ever see this happen because "federation" on ATProto means basically reproducing the entirety of the Bluesky software stack. In old Big Data terms, on ActivityPub your instance is a "horizontal shard" of the network; ATProto forces full DB replicas only.
Still, we're seeing movement on this front, which I'd split into two categories:
1. Your fault (you reading this)
2. Aaron Rodericks's faultI'm mainly surprised that the facade fell so early with Bluesky. I expected atleast another few years before something happened to expose the reality.
&handle=@bnewbold.net&avatar=https://cdn.bsky.app/img/avatar/plain/did:plc:44ybard66vv44zksje25o7dz/bafkreiglnysron3h2je7nf6cmvtimuaxi7xe2c7rkxitmks3mzmajnc2ou@jpeg)
I was hoping Blacksky found a way around that problem, but I have no idea whether or not that is even possible because I have no idea how AT works.
