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

[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.

[emaytch@mastodon.social]

@mcc its really weird for it to be controversial to compare ATProto to blockchain when it was an explicit selling point of the protocol before blockchains became embarrassing to develop for!!

[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?)