I would like to give an update on "federation" on Bluesky
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@mcc do you think this work (on Blacksky or northsky's part) will lead to more independent atproto towers showing up in the future?
@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.)
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@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.)
@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.
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@mcc it's a client (aka app) that uses an appview -- currently the Bluesky appview
@jdp23 oh dear.
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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.
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@mcc I'm curious, but I haven't had any time to look into this, so if you know off the top of your head, cost aside, how much work/knowledge does it take to stand up the whole stack at this point? Does Blacksky, for example, or Northsky, have their software available and documented? I think that it would be fun to try to try, but I have limited time and this isn't really my specialization.
@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
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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.
@mcc @aeva I continue to be annoyed that whenever anyone brings up legitimate gripes with how bsky is operated, the staff claim "open protocol", "federation", and "user freedom", when the reality is that with only a handful of alternate towers that represent maybe a single digit percentage of users at best, for all intents and purposes it is not federated in any way that brings meaningful choice to the average user.
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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.
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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.
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@mcc @aeva I continue to be annoyed that whenever anyone brings up legitimate gripes with how bsky is operated, the staff claim "open protocol", "federation", and "user freedom", when the reality is that with only a handful of alternate towers that represent maybe a single digit percentage of users at best, for all intents and purposes it is not federated in any way that brings meaningful choice to the average user.
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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@mcc @aeva I continue to be annoyed that whenever anyone brings up legitimate gripes with how bsky is operated, the staff claim "open protocol", "federation", and "user freedom", when the reality is that with only a handful of alternate towers that represent maybe a single digit percentage of users at best, for all intents and purposes it is not federated in any way that brings meaningful choice to the average user.
@swetland @aeva Yeah. I am using the exact alternate infrastructure that the bluesky reps point to as proof their system works. And I *still* cannot tell, if Bluesky banned someone and Blacksky disagrees with the ban, if I would be able to see that person's posts or not. In response to this thread I've had one person tell me I'm underestimating Blacksky's stack coverage and another tell me I'm overestimating it.
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@jdp23 oh dear.
@mcc well, it's incremental implementation. Having their own client lets them make different blocking decisions from Bluesky, so is useful in its own right even though it doesn't get all the way there. The real value of the appview will kick in once it's got the equivalent of local-only posts.
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@mcc well, it's incremental implementation. Having their own client lets them make different blocking decisions from Bluesky, so is useful in its own right even though it doesn't get all the way there. The real value of the appview will kick in once it's got the equivalent of local-only posts.
@jdp23 "Having their own client lets them make different blocking decisions from Bluesky"
How?
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@jdp23 "Having their own client lets them make different blocking decisions from Bluesky"
How?
@mcc Blocks are "enforced" at the client level. I know, I know, that probably merits another "oh dear" but that's how Bluesky is doing it. So blacksky.community as a client doesn't do age verification for DMs in the UK, or block access to Mississippi.
Takedowns by contrast are at the AppView and someties PDS level.
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@GroupNebula563 @mcc Would be nice! Won't happen though.
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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 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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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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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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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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@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?)
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@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.
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@mcc it's such a confusing aspect of the protocol. why does everything need the firehose? how do they expect it to scale/?
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@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!!
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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.
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@michelelinux @elettrona @fediverso@forum.pierobosio.it @Ali_per_Viaggiare @deedend @peertube @morrolinux @fediverso@diggita.com @anaru_sensei esattament, l’eccessiva frammentazione è la maledizione del fediverso, un po’ come accade su Linux, alla fine troppe scelte confondono le persone e spesso si ritrovano in istanze sbagliate su cui si trovano male o perché troppo affollate come Mastodon social o perché poco attive o poco affini ai propri interessi.
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@kristiana @Ali_per_Viaggiare @deedend @peertube @morrolinux @fediverso @anaru_sensei certo che con i soldi che guadagna potrebbe tranquillamente aprirsi una propria istanza peertube. Ma credo che sia parecchio oneroso supportare milioni di viste e non avendo alcun tipo di ritorno economico sarebbe un bagno di sangue.
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@deedend @filippodb @peertube @morrolinux @fediverso @anaru_sensei basterebbero gli sponsor teoricamente. Però è un indotto che va creato con più difficoltà. Ma in questo mondo, dove tutti vogliono tutto, subito e facilmente la vedo dura...
