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

[mcc@mastodon.social]

I (me, mcc) never trusted Bluesky, so I've been self-hosting my own PDS from the start. I've been happily using blacksky.community for the last month (since Bluesky started gating access to their appview/web frontend on clicking to agree to a new TOS that seemed to me sketchy). Hypothetically, "Gertrude" could do the same. She can join Northsky PDS, make posts through Zeppelin, and Bluesky blocks her but Blacksky just fetches the posts from her PDS for me, and I get to read them.

Right? (2/3)

[mcc@mastodon.social]

No. Because "Gertrude", in our hypothetical, *won't bother making those posts*. Because the vast, incredible, overwhelming majority of Bluesky users are still on the Bluesky network, and she is excommunicated. She *could* cultivate a group of followers who all use the Northsky infrastructure just so they can see her posts. But she could also cultivate a following on her Patreon. So Hypothetical Gertrude ignores Bluesky, posts to Patreon, and her Patreon posts get *shared* to Bluesky. (3/3)

[mcc@mastodon.social]

And that's why I say, TLDR:

- I am legitimately excited about the work being done by Blacksky Algorithms! I am using their frontend and happy with it.

- Northsky is an interesting development to watch

- If you're on a Bluesky PDS, I recommend migrating off with one of these tools https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:ii5jchdzlmcojjw4dqczcgkh/post/3lyt6t6qfa22u

- Everything Sucks. A LOT of things would have to change at a social level for *any* entity other than Bluesky to have power or independence in the ATP ecosystem. I still don't trust Bluesky.

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@mcc do you think this work (on Blacksky or northsky's part) will lead to more independent atproto towers showing up in the future?

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@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.)

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@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.

[cthos@mastodon.cthos.dev]

@mcc @aeva Is there a good breakdown of the overall costs? Like I saw a lightweight AppView implementation still has to store roughly 2 gb of data per day, indefinitely, and...that's a _lot_ of storage.

I assume there's also a fair amount of bandwidth and other cost involved.

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@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.

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@cthos @aeva Every Bluesky replica is, probably without realizing it, making a bet that Bluesky has already plateaued.

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@mcc @cthos ah :( 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.