I would like to give an update on "federation" on Bluesky
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@benroyce @mcc @aeva I think in this case what's driving most of the adoption is people wanting "twitter but less terrible" or "twitter like it was in the (imagined) good old days" and bsky is giving them the closest experience to that they can get at the moment. There are absolutely true believers in their handwaved distributed/federation/freedom promises (and they are quite loud, especially if you ever question the reality of that situation), but I think most are just fleeing Musk's tire fire.
@benroyce @mcc @aeva A lot of these folks have had very negative Mastodon (well fedi, but from their POV it's about the "app" not the network) experiences and are somewhere between unconvinced that federation is a good thing, believing it's actively a *bad* thing, or just completely unaware or uncaring about the implementation vs the UI/UX experience of their social app.
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they unfortunately moved from #twitter to a ticking time bomb
since #bluesky is #crypto bro #ventureCapital fueled, when the investors ask for their return, they will change the ethos and ruin bluesky with #monetization digs. and maybe even put an elon #musk in place at the top and warp it for a political agenda, since all these #plutocrat money pools are connected agenda-wise
and then bluesky goes the way of twitter
and then people have to move all over again
@benroyce @mcc @aeva No argument from me on that account. I mean even if they were completely benign, just being a VC funded enterprise means they're going to need an exit (ideally a profitable one for the investors) and one way or another it'll probably end up being a crap deal for the users.
Many of the folks who moved there for "classic twitter" even acknowledge this and are resigned to move again someday... valuing the familiar experience over everything else.
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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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@markc568 Yeah, but Mastodon GmbH runs it and also develops Mastodon-the-software, so it could have in practice had the same effect as bsky.social. But it sounds like it doesn’t, and that’s good! (even if there are plenty of other issues with Mastodon GmbH and mastodon.social)
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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.
@mcc @cthos @aeva I feel like fedi's cost/scaling problem mostly centers around issues with the implementation and deployment of Mastodon (the most popular server), with some features of the protocol being not entirely optimal, compared to the fundamental design of atp being hostile to lightweight independent instances.
Somebody could build a "better Mastodon" and instantly give people a lower resource / less complicated option for small or self-hosted yet fully interoperable fedi servers.
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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
@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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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 fault@mcc Hmmm Thanks for the thread. Sad, but glad I heard it.
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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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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 great thread. I've been thinking about this, and about the ActivityPub alternative. Which to me looks like either
- Best case: "Gertrude" can speak freely on a friendly instance (which she used originally) and unfriendly instances/users can block her. But she keeps posting to her audience
- Worst case: "Gertrude" is banned by her instance, and now does not even have the option to continue speaking to her followers, she has to start a new account/identity from scratch, try and integrate into the community again, prove she's not an impostor, etc
With ATProto you don't get that best case scenario. But you don't get that worst case scenario either.
Btw, I saw pfrazee say they don't do PDS deletions except for illegal content (since they have to by law in that case). But on that note, they could even go further if they wanted (I think?) and block PDS migrations at which point we are back in the worst case scenario.
The comparisons and tradeoffs here are really complex! Just starting to wrap my head around it.
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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.
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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@coales.co Something that I also feel is important is that moderation services are all responsible for the entire network. They can limit scope by just focusing on Bluesky posts or zeroing in on a specific subject, but it seems like a very steep mountain to climb and the more likely situation is that they just leave space for someone else to come in. Considering that Bluesky's moderation service has been the only global one for years at this point, it's safe to assume that it's load-bearing which makes it that much harder to actually unsubscribe from the moderation service without being exposed to all sorts of harmful content. It's a sort of "decentralized, but the barrier of entry is so high that it's mostly effectively centralized" situation there—hopefully we'll see someone (probably Blacksky) overcome that hurdle.
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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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@msh@coales.co Something that I also feel is important is that moderation services are all responsible for the entire network. They can limit scope by just focusing on Bluesky posts or zeroing in on a specific subject, but it seems like a very steep mountain to climb and the more likely situation is that they just leave space for someone else to come in. Considering that Bluesky's moderation service has been the only global one for years at this point, it's safe to assume that it's load-bearing which makes it that much harder to actually unsubscribe from the moderation service without being exposed to all sorts of harmful content. It's a sort of "decentralized, but the barrier of entry is so high that it's mostly effectively centralized" situation there—hopefully we'll see someone (probably Blacksky) overcome that hurdle.
On the flipside however, the fediverse deals with its own moderation problems. Some "too big to defederate" instance is left untouched for long enough for someone to slip in and post CSAM and suddenly it's everyone else's problem because there isn't any way to coordinate cross-server moderation decisions, and don't get me started on the amount of times that entire communities have been cut off and split apart over an admin/moderator deciding that they don't like the actions of a few individuals. It's part of why I don't feel comfortable self hosting in all honesty
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@mcc great thread. I've been thinking about this, and about the ActivityPub alternative. Which to me looks like either
- Best case: "Gertrude" can speak freely on a friendly instance (which she used originally) and unfriendly instances/users can block her. But she keeps posting to her audience
- Worst case: "Gertrude" is banned by her instance, and now does not even have the option to continue speaking to her followers, she has to start a new account/identity from scratch, try and integrate into the community again, prove she's not an impostor, etc
With ATProto you don't get that best case scenario. But you don't get that worst case scenario either.
Btw, I saw pfrazee say they don't do PDS deletions except for illegal content (since they have to by law in that case). But on that note, they could even go further if they wanted (I think?) and block PDS migrations at which point we are back in the worst case scenario.
The comparisons and tradeoffs here are really complex! Just starting to wrap my head around it.
@mcc oops I was wrong, they actually do PDS takedowns although they're working on it. This brings us (currently) back in the worst case scenario, but with a path out in the future hopefully. At Bluesky's whim I guess? Ouch.
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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 Which PDS implementation are you self hosting with?
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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.
Work by Eurosky and Gander (in Canada) on this front is getting driven by not wanting data to flow to the US.
In general though I agree that it's not yet all that compelling for most people and organizations. Once things get easier and we start to see hosting services (analogous to masto.host) it'll be interesting to see how things evolve.
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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 fault@mcc There's also https://plc.directory/, the
did:plc:database, also run by Bluesky.("
plc" stands for "placeholder", because they aspire to figure out something blockchain decentralized later.)I think Bluesky can inconvenience people at best, or hijack their accounts at worst, especially if they were using a Bluesky PDS and Bluesky has all the keys. But I don't know/remember the exact implications.
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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 faultee@mcc@mastodon.social looks like an ini
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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
@esoteric_programmer @alter_kaker @mcc This is curious to me, because it looks like he's running a relay as an actual relay, just passing along data, which would explain why it's relatively low-cost. But the Relay described by the Bluesky white paper was more than just a relay— it was a replacement (or rebrand) for the earlier Big Data Server that was supposed to not only pass data, but also store and index it all for the network. And I can't tell if those other, more expensive functions got offloaded to other services, or if there are two types of relays in the infrastructure, or something else.
Gli ultimi otto messaggi ricevuti dalla Federazione
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Every major version is a milestone, and 8.0.0 is no exception. Your WordPress blog just became a two-way street in the Fediverse. Visitors can like and boost your posts directly on your site. Media from federated replies is handled more reliably, and new block patterns make it easy to drop ActivityPub features into your pages.
Like and Boost, Right From Your BlogThe Fediverse Reactions block now has optional Like and Boost action buttons, inline with each reaction group. When a visitor clicks one, a modal opens where they can enter their Fediverse handle or copy the post URL to interact from their home server.
The plugin remembers the visitor’s profile in their browser, so the second time around it’s even faster. And for folks who aren’t familiar with how the Fediverse works, each modal now includes a collapsible “Why do I need to enter my profile?” help section that explains the open social web in plain language.
This dramatically lowers the friction for cross-platform engagement.
Block Patterns and TemplatesSetting up a Fediverse-ready profile page used to mean manually assembling Follow Me, Extra Fields, and Followers blocks. Not anymore.
We’ve added a “Fediverse” block pattern category with four pre-configured layouts:
Author Profile with Follow, a compact profile card.Fediverse Follow Page, a full-page follow experience.Author Header with Follow, great for author archive headers.Fediverse Sidebar, drop it into any sidebar or widget area.If you’re running a block theme on WordPress 6.7+, there’s also a new Author Archive (Fediverse) block theme template ready to go.
Publish Smarter With Post Format SuggestionsA new pre-publish panel now analyzes your post content and suggests an appropriate post format when your object type is set to “Post Format.” Got a post that’s mostly images? It’ll nudge you toward the Image format. A video post? Video format.
This matters because media-focused Fediverse platforms like Pixelfed and Vernissage display Notes differently than Articles, so choosing the right format means your content looks its best everywhere it lands.
Community SnippetsWe’ve added a snippets/ folder to the GitHub repository, a home for lightweight, community-contributed extensions that don’t belong in the core plugin but are too useful to lose. The first batch includes:
FediBlog Tag, automatically adds #FediBlog to standard blog posts for better Fediverse discovery.Locale from Tags, derives post locale from taxonomy tags.Bot Account, marks your profile as automated and displays a “BOT” badge in the Fediverse.Blockless ActivityPub, renders Fediverse reactions as pure server-side HTML, no JS required.Photon CDN, serves cached remote media through Jetpack’s Photon CDN for faster delivery.Got a snippet of your own? Check out the snippets folder and send a PR.
Smarter Media CachingUnder the hood, we’ve rebuilt how the plugin handles remote media, avatars, emoji, images, audio, and video from across the Fediverse. Instead of importing everything into the WordPress Media Library at insert time, media is now wrapped in custom blocks and cached lazily at render time.
What does that mean for you? Faster processing of incoming content, less disk usage, and better rendering of audio and video attachments. Original remote URLs are preserved in block attributes, so caches can be regenerated without data loss. If you’re using Jetpack’s Site Accelerator, that works too, the new system is built filter-first.
For site admins, there are new CLI commands to keep things tidy:
wp activitypub cache statuswp activitypub cache clearMinimum PHP 7.4With WordPress 7.0 deprecating PHP 7.2 and 7.3, we’ve raised the minimum requirement to PHP 7.4. This lets us clean up compatibility polyfills and use more modern PHP features going forward. If you’re still on an older version, update your PHP before updating the plugin.
ChangelogAddedAdd a help section to interaction dialogs explaining the Fediverse and why entering a profile is needed.Add a notice on the Settings page to easily switch from legacy template mode to automatic mode.Add a pre-publish suggestion that recommends a post format for better compatibility with media-focused Fediverse platforms.Add a Site Health check that warns when plugins are causing too many federation updates.Add backwards compatibility for the ACTIVITYPUB_DISABLE_SIDELOADING constant and activitypub_sideloading_enabled filter from version 7.9.1.Add bot account snippet that marks ActivityPub profiles as automated accounts, displaying a “BOT” badge on Mastodon and other Fediverse platforms.Add Cache namespace for remote media caching with CLI commands, improved MIME validation, and filter-based architecture.Add federation of video poster images set in the WordPress video block.Add Locale from Tags community snippet.Add optional Like and Boost action buttons to the Fediverse Reactions block, allowing visitors to interact with posts from their own server.Add pre-built Fediverse block patterns for easy profile, follow page, and sidebar setup.Add snippet for blockless fediverse reactions.Add wp activitypub fetch CLI command for fetching remote URLs with signed HTTP requests.ChangedImproved active user counting for NodeInfo to include all federated content types and comments.Improve language map resolution to strictly follow the ActivityStreams spec.Superseded outbox activities are now removed instead of kept, reducing clutter in the outbox.The minimum required PHP version is now 7.4.FixedAccept incoming activities from servers that use standalone key objects for HTTP Signatures.Fix a crash on servers where WordPress uses FTP instead of direct file access for media caching.Fix a crash when receiving posts from certain federated platforms that send multilingual content.Fix automatic cleanup of old activities failing silently on sites with large numbers of outbox, inbox, or remote post items.Fix comment count to properly exclude likes, shares, and notes.Fix follow button redirect from Mastodon not being recognized.Fix modal overlay not covering the full screen on block themes.Fix outbox invalidation canceling pending Accept/Reject responses to QuoteRequests for the same post.Fix QuoteRequest handler to derive responding actor from post author instead of inbox recipient.Fix reactions block buttons inheriting theme background color on classic themes.Fix reactions block layout on small screens and remove unwanted button highlight when clicking action buttons.Fix signature verification rejecting valid requests that use lowercase algorithm names in the Digest header.Fix soft-deleted posts being served instead of a tombstone when the post is re-saved.Improve compatibility with federated services that use a URL reference for the actor’s public key.Improve handling of all public audience identifiers when sending activities to followers and relays.Prevent private recipient lists from being shared when sending activities to other servers.Get ItDownload from WordPress.org or grab it on GitHub. Remember to check your PHP version first — 7.4 or higher is now required.
A huge thank you to everyone who contributed code, testing, bug reports, and ideas to this release. Special thanks to @kraft, @jeremy, and @futtta for their snippet contributions.
Update, try out those Like and Boost buttons, and let us know what you think — what’s the feature you’ve been waiting for? What would you like to see next?
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@meuwese @grimjfoot @EUCommission @EC_DIGIT @HennaVirkkunen
I hope it helps
Glad to see attention is being put on it.Mastodon needs can easy link for websites to add.
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@kevinrns @grimjfoot @EUCommission @EC_DIGIT @HennaVirkkunen
It's definitely an issue, but work is being done on it. This might help?
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@grimjfoot@mastodon.uno @EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu @EC_DIGIT@ec.social-network.europa.eu @HennaVirkkunen@ec.social-network.europa.eu
hopefully calling it fediverse, otherwise it risk sounds like my grannie saying internet explorer when she means the web.
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@kevinrns @grimjfoot @HennaVirkkunen
It could be enough to make a link to this or to a EU hosted page about what is Fediverse and how to join it.
And, mixing up the Fediverse with a platform (Mastodon) should be avoided. I'm on Friendica and it's Fediverse too.
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@grimjfoot @EUCommission @EC_DIGIT @HennaVirkkunen
A lot of the reason is there's no easy link to mastodon.
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Yes! And remove X while you're at it.
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The #EuropeanCommission and other #EU institutions have been present on #Mastodon for some time.
However, there is still no reference to #fediverse #socialmedia on European institutional websites, while the traditional ones are still present.
Why not update these pages, highlighting an ethical policy choice?
