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

[mattsheffield@mastodon.social]

@mcc The layers are indeed censorship choke points.

What I'm saying is that in this case, it appears to be the labeler of Bluesky that's the issue. Any app view that uses it will suppress Link's parts, even if he's not banned locally.

The app view of Blacksky would hide him locally but he wouldn't be banned. This is why he can post but can't see his own posts. The Blacksky app view (the site) is independent except for the labeling.

[tess@mastodon.social]

@mcc that all scans, and, I hope it's just a miscommunication as to the current state of BlackSky.

If nothing else, this is the five-alarm fire that should expedite the switchover.

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@tess I am inclined to give Rudy a lot of leeway because he is clearly moving very fast. I'd rather him engineer than answer my questions and I'd rather not interrupt him while he's engineering a thing I want to use.

But I just want to know what the software I'm using… like… is.

[tess@mastodon.social]

@mcc *sigh* i get it

I'm holding out for Northsky even though I fear it's going to be the typical flameout but the fact that BlackSky is offering PDSes to people outside the community is also super appealing.

Seeing how they handle this situation might be what puts me over the edge.

That said, I'm also not trying to build my own tools; just use a nice platform run by people I trust.

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@mattsheffield *sighs*

I feel like I'm having a lot of repetitive conversations. The thing you are claiming was my conclusion as of last night, but then I was shown an additional piece of evidence, which makes me conclude something different. This was documented in one of the threads I link above, but I link a lot of things above, so I assume you didn't see it. I can explain it, but it would make more sense to just wait for Rudy (who I've asked for an explanation) to explain.

[mattsheffield@mastodon.social]

@mcc I think I did see it, the one referencing the network traffic from bsky.app? I think that's because the labeling instructions are pulled from there and assembled by the client. So it appears to be an app view issue but is actually a labeling one.

But you're right that only Rudy can clarify this

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@mattsheffield In the screenshot, you see two headers: atproto-accept-labelers, which shows two labelers i assume to be bluesky and blacksky, and atproto-proxy, which indicates which appview is to be used (source: bryan newbold from bluesky), and shows only api.bluesky. So I believe both issues are live. But I am more worried about the appview/atproto-proxy issue, because out of the two, I assume it to be the more difficult issue to fix.

[mattsheffield@mastodon.social]

@mcc It's possible that Rudy has an independent app view because that can be part of a PDS, but he is not deploying it because his users wouldn't be able to use a mobile app to interface with.

They tout the ability to log in via the Bluesky app into Blacksky PDS, and possibly this is why that traffic is happening.

I have seen Link's account on another PDS, which does suggest that the app view and labeler are both live issues, as you're surmising. https://social.shatteredsky.net/profile/did:plc:63hvnyjvqi2nzzcsjgnry5we

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@mattsheffield I do not think, in the context of the post you have made here, shatteredsky is "a PDS". I think we are using terminology differently and this is making it difficult for me to follow the conversation.

[mattsheffield@mastodon.social]

@mcc It is both a PDS and an app view. I'll be publishing a piece about this later today after getting more info. Nothing from Rudy though

[ellyxir@humanwords.cc]

@mcc@mastodon.social amazing thread. so clear even explaining what you’re not clear about. but it does make me feel like it shouldn’t be this complicated. i haven’t looked at atproto but everything i read makes me not want to.

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@ellyxir I honestly don't think their architecture is very good

[jdp23@neuromatch.social]

@mcc mmmmkay it looks like Rudy is now in the process of "standing up an app.bsky.* API server" (aka appview) which "Is different from our community.blacksky.* API which is going on hold". So, my best guess is that his answer to you reflected the architecture (where the ommunity.blacksky,* API server is conceptually part of blacksky,.community) rather than the currently-available public implementation at the time.

(And no idea whether he's standing up an early implementation of their Rust appview or doing the off-the-shelf Bluesky appview or something else.)

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@jdp23 What's interesting to me here is, the bluesky line is "ha ha it's super good everyone is angry at us because it accelerates federation", but you're making it sound like Rudy is having to upend his software engineering schedule to do stuff he otherwise wouldn't have had to do at all early, because of this incident forcing him to protect his users

[adrienne@social.treehouse.systems]

@eniko @mcc if you're on your own PDS, you at least don't lose all your existing posts if bsky decides to permaban you. (If you're on one of their mushroom PDSes, they'll nuke all your content along with a permaban.)

[anna@hexile.witches.live]

@adrienne @eniko @mcc one thing i was never clear on, if you have your own pds and get permad, can you migrate and get around the perma, or is it some kind of cryptographic seed/hash of your pds data that's perma'd so you're fucked?

[by_caballero@mastodon.social]

@mcc @jdp23 here guys this might help clarify why Rudy has to rearrange his epics in jira:
https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3m2j6ccx2bs2t
moderation can only be additive until/unless you pony up the CSAM/hashmatch API key money plus roll and run yr own mod sys at scale. thats the real Achilles heel of composable moderation-- replacing the bottom layer is incredibly expensive

[jdp23@neuromatch.social]

@mcc yeah have a look at Rudy's thread there, he makes that very clear. And similarly Northsky is saying well, our original plan was do PDS as Phase 1, Relay as Phase 2, and AppView as Phase 3, but now we're acceslerating Relay and AppView up and treating it all as Phase 1. My take is that everybody always took the approach of treating Bluesky PBC as a potential adversary but didn't expect them to be this adversarialy this quickly.

(If this is all an N-dimensional chess play to blow up the company to speed up the decentralization ... well as shitposting goes, that's pretty darned epic. But it's probably just horrbile comms accelerating and magnifying the tensions that were always inherent. Time will tell I guess.)

@by_caballero it's true that's a huge hole in the composable moderation model (and Rudy and others had been looking at it even before this -- https://discourse.atprotocol.community/t/how-should-we-fairly-split-the-costs-of-commons-moderation-across-producer-and-consumer-apps/122 is interesting thinking from the Eurosky perspective although doesn't yet point to any conclusions). But for this particular case they just need an appeal method for community members that allows themm to override the Bluesky mod service's app-level takedowns in their own AppView. On the deeper issue though I feel pretty vindicated because I've always said that composable moderation is interesting and valuable in some important use cases but doesn't actually solve the moderation scalability issue.

[thisismissem@hachyderm.io]

@anna @adrienne @eniko @mcc all the records in your PDS contain references to your identity (DID document), it's theoretically possible to modify the data to change that but requires rewriting your entire PDS for that account, so not particularly practical.

It's the DID that is moderated against in the higher layers, not your handle.

So it doesn't matter if you're @fred.example or @jason.example, if the DID used for one becomes the DID used for another handle.

It's kinda like how on ActivityPub, software has often encoded your username into the identifier for all your posts, meaning you can't change it without breaking everything.

(Though Mastodon is starting to fix this long-standing issue, there's fix only applies on new accounts, there's no protocol level way to fix it yet — it's kinda a weakness in JSON-LD)

[mcc@mastodon.social]

Follow up, 2025-12-27: Rudy here confirms the Blacksky appview is still being worked on (eg: blacksky uses bluesky's appview still)

https://bsky.app/profile/rude1.blacksky.team/post/3maykethsbk24

The sticking point, as he describes it, is "backfill". This alludes to the issue that makes me compare ATProto to blockchain: to get the features users expect, every node on the network must mirror the network's entire history. This is impractical, which is why bluesky is as of this moment a federated network with effectively only one node.