I would like to give an update on "federation" on Bluesky

[whitequark@mastodon.social]

@mcc it's such a confusing aspect of the protocol. why does everything need the firehose? how do they expect it to scale/?

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@whitequark If hypothetically, just hypothetically, we imagine that a core design requirement of the protocol was "regardless of what happens in future, it must continue to be necessary that the company Bluesky LLC exists"… the decision becomes a lot less confusing.

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@whitequark (More charitably: If one considered fast, full-text search to be a highest priority feature, and it was merely *unimportant* to the designer whether a second full-service node could ever function… then one might make the decisions bluesky made here.

As for scaling, I assume when the day comes they need it to actually scale they'll either discontinue or break the externally-published linear event stream?)

[mcc@mastodon.social]

:frogsiren: BLUESKY HAS OFFICIALLY NETSPLIT :frogsiren:

There has always been more than one Fediverse. Different instances make different moderation decisions so some instances can't see posts by some users.

There has only ever been one Bluesky because every ATProto frontend uses the same Appview.

It is January 2026 and that's no longer true; Blacksky's Appview is available for beta use and there is at least 1 user banned on Bluesky but not Blacksky. And vice versa.

https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:w4xbfzo7kqfes5zb7r6qv3rw/post/3mcozwdhjos2b

[mayintoronto@beige.party]

@mcc Would this mean that there'd be a new bridgy specifically to Blacksky?

[quillmatiq@mastodon.social]

@mayintoronto No - Bridgy Fed supports any ATProto PDS, including the ones run by Blacksky

@mcc

[coracinho@sunbeam.city]

@mcc for us tech noobies in the audience, could you explain what does this mean?

[mcc@mastodon.social]

The "portable identity" elements of Bluesky/ATProto make the netsplit just a tad odd. My account is hosted on a PDS server I run, so I'm beholden to no frontend. If I log in through the main Blacksky frontend (Bluesky appview) one user I'm following shows only an error message. Via the Staging Blacksky frontend (atproto.africa), I can see I'm following him and see his posts. I'm SO curious about the edge cases. I assume if I boost him it's hidden from the Bluesky appview. What if I reply to him?

[fabrice@fosstodon.org]

@mcc When you are suspended by bluesky corp, is the ban at the app view or PDS level?

[martinvermeer@fediscience.org]

@quillmatiq @mayintoronto @mcc But what if I want to cancel the bridge, but only to the Nazi one? Can I do that, and advise my correspondents to migrate to BlackSky? How hard would that be?

[quillmatiq@mastodon.social]

@martinvermeer Not today, but stay tuned for next week 🙂

@mayintoronto @mcc

[mcc@mastodon.social]

Oh and I can't get staging.blacksky on my phone app. So imagine if you were using Mastodon, but you saw a slightly different list of posters, *and potentially a different set of your own posts*, depending on whether you were using your PC or your phone. This is great if there's a banned user you want to follow— you get an *option* to follow them. Mastodon.social can deny me the *option* to follow someone, on Fediverse. But except in this edge case that *might* not be a fantastic user experience!

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@coracinho Does this help? https://mastodon.social/@mcc/115918101156654032

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@fabrice This is a VERY interesting question, as the answer appears to be "all of them". And when Link got banned, *that answer appeared to be surprising even to Bluesky employees*. The original messaging from Bluesky suggested you'd get banned only by the "labeler"— a third thing altogether. But there's obvious problems with that answer, it's never what Bluesky implemented. After Link got banned Bluesky said they were reviewing this, but I don't think *changed* anything.

[mcc@mastodon.social]

Oh, and let's consider, for a moment, the downsides of an individual user being able to "opt out" of moderation decisions. The problem with misbehavior on social media is force multipliers. One person harassing you is no problem; one person and their 3000 friends is a big problem. Imagine Bluesky and Blacksky ban user X but Trumpsky lets X keep posting. Now their 3000 friends— still in Bluesky's good graces— can see their posts calling to harass you, AND can zero-friction zip over to yell at you

[ratsnakegames@mastodon.social]

@mcc is

is Trumpsky a real thing

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@ratsnakegames No

[ratsnakegames@mastodon.social]

@mcc phew, you had me worried for a second there was another one of Those Bloody Things

[mcc@mastodon.social]

This is why—although, now Blacksky is letting me "see through" Bluesky's worst moderation decisions, I'm glad, because Bluesky's moderation is weird and arbitrary—I think it's a downside of the network, and Mastodon made the right decision not offering this feature. Fediverse defederation forces a degree of soft group consensus on moderation: it's possible to say "if you're talking to X, I don't want to talk to *you*". On Bluesky we are all ghosts walking through walls and this can't be enforced

[operand@todon.nl]

@mcc I guess you could simultaneously see this as a success and a failure for ATproto: decentralization is possible... but you immediately get a lot of the same problems ActivityPub has that ATProto ostensibly solved.