I would like to give an update on "federation" on Bluesky
-
@falken @coracinho Also the *way* in which Blacksky is making progress seems to me to make it look improbable any of the rest of us will reproduce what Blacksky has done. It's taken months of Rudy's time and he's had to purchase storage for "terabytes" of data because *standing up a new Blacksky "instance", in a total sense, requires literally mirroring everything posted on the network*, including spam and old inaccessible chats on people's https://stream.place streams
@mcc @coracinho huh. Still!
Don't suppose there is a write up somewhere that digs into it? Like, rather than mirroring the firehose, could they not store new stuff, and fall back to grabbing from Bluesky if missing.
-
Oh and I can't get staging.blacksky on my phone app. So imagine if you were using Mastodon, but you saw a slightly different list of posters, *and potentially a different set of your own posts*, depending on whether you were using your PC or your phone. This is great if there's a banned user you want to follow— you get an *option* to follow them. Mastodon.social can deny me the *option* to follow someone, on Fediverse. But except in this edge case that *might* not be a fantastic user experience!
Oh, and let's consider, for a moment, the downsides of an individual user being able to "opt out" of moderation decisions. The problem with misbehavior on social media is force multipliers. One person harassing you is no problem; one person and their 3000 friends is a big problem. Imagine Bluesky and Blacksky ban user X but Trumpsky lets X keep posting. Now their 3000 friends— still in Bluesky's good graces— can see their posts calling to harass you, AND can zero-friction zip over to yell at you
-
Oh, and let's consider, for a moment, the downsides of an individual user being able to "opt out" of moderation decisions. The problem with misbehavior on social media is force multipliers. One person harassing you is no problem; one person and their 3000 friends is a big problem. Imagine Bluesky and Blacksky ban user X but Trumpsky lets X keep posting. Now their 3000 friends— still in Bluesky's good graces— can see their posts calling to harass you, AND can zero-friction zip over to yell at you
@mcc is
is Trumpsky a real thing
-
@mcc is
is Trumpsky a real thing
-
@mcc phew, you had me worried for a second there was another one of Those Bloody Things
-
Oh, and let's consider, for a moment, the downsides of an individual user being able to "opt out" of moderation decisions. The problem with misbehavior on social media is force multipliers. One person harassing you is no problem; one person and their 3000 friends is a big problem. Imagine Bluesky and Blacksky ban user X but Trumpsky lets X keep posting. Now their 3000 friends— still in Bluesky's good graces— can see their posts calling to harass you, AND can zero-friction zip over to yell at you
This is why—although, now Blacksky is letting me "see through" Bluesky's worst moderation decisions, I'm glad, because Bluesky's moderation is weird and arbitrary—I think it's a downside of the network, and Mastodon made the right decision not offering this feature. Fediverse defederation forces a degree of soft group consensus on moderation: it's possible to say "if you're talking to X, I don't want to talk to *you*". On Bluesky we are all ghosts walking through walls and this can't be enforced
-
This is why—although, now Blacksky is letting me "see through" Bluesky's worst moderation decisions, I'm glad, because Bluesky's moderation is weird and arbitrary—I think it's a downside of the network, and Mastodon made the right decision not offering this feature. Fediverse defederation forces a degree of soft group consensus on moderation: it's possible to say "if you're talking to X, I don't want to talk to *you*". On Bluesky we are all ghosts walking through walls and this can't be enforced
@mcc I guess you could simultaneously see this as a success and a failure for ATproto: decentralization is possible... but you immediately get a lot of the same problems ActivityPub has that ATProto ostensibly solved.
-
@mcc phew, you had me worried for a second there was another one of Those Bloody Things
@ratsnakegames @mcc it's probably only a matter of time though. And as with fedi/AP, where this already did happen, how the network reacts and deals with it will be a real test of its philosophy.
-
@mcc I guess you could simultaneously see this as a success and a failure for ATproto: decentralization is possible... but you immediately get a lot of the same problems ActivityPub has that ATProto ostensibly solved.
@operand However, they experience those problems in a *completely different way*, which not only is their userbase unprepared for, but the pre-existing experience of fediverse users does not exactly prepare for!
-
@ratsnakegames @mcc it's probably only a matter of time though. And as with fedi/AP, where this already did happen, how the network reacts and deals with it will be a real test of its philosophy.
@megmac I refuse to believe Bluesky has a philosophy
-
This is why—although, now Blacksky is letting me "see through" Bluesky's worst moderation decisions, I'm glad, because Bluesky's moderation is weird and arbitrary—I think it's a downside of the network, and Mastodon made the right decision not offering this feature. Fediverse defederation forces a degree of soft group consensus on moderation: it's possible to say "if you're talking to X, I don't want to talk to *you*". On Bluesky we are all ghosts walking through walls and this can't be enforced
@mcc Interestingly, this also breaks one of the main selling points of having a network architecture like ATProtos: that 'everyone gets all the replies' because suddenly you don't, maybe!
-
:frogsiren: BLUESKY HAS OFFICIALLY NETSPLIT :frogsiren:
There has always been more than one Fediverse. Different instances make different moderation decisions so some instances can't see posts by some users.
There has only ever been one Bluesky because every ATProto frontend uses the same Appview.
It is January 2026 and that's no longer true; Blacksky's Appview is available for beta use and there is at least 1 user banned on Bluesky but not Blacksky. And vice versa.
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:w4xbfzo7kqfes5zb7r6qv3rw/post/3mcozwdhjos2b
@mcc blacksky is the social media platform for Black users that the fediverse promises to be and fails at
-
@mcc blacksky is the social media platform for Black users that the fediverse promises to be and fails at
@mcc for better or worse
-
@mcc blacksky is the social media platform for Black users that the fediverse promises to be and fails at
@burnoutqueen If it were not for Blacksky it is quite possible I would no longer be using Bluesky.
-
@megmac I refuse to believe Bluesky has a philosophy
A philosophy is one of these things like a harassment policy or an infosec strategy: if someone thinks they don't have one, that just means that they have an informal, implicit and probably really bad one.
-
:frogsiren: BLUESKY HAS OFFICIALLY NETSPLIT :frogsiren:
There has always been more than one Fediverse. Different instances make different moderation decisions so some instances can't see posts by some users.
There has only ever been one Bluesky because every ATProto frontend uses the same Appview.
It is January 2026 and that's no longer true; Blacksky's Appview is available for beta use and there is at least 1 user banned on Bluesky but not Blacksky. And vice versa.
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:w4xbfzo7kqfes5zb7r6qv3rw/post/3mcozwdhjos2b
@mcc Someone should update the Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacksky
-
:frogsiren: BLUESKY HAS OFFICIALLY NETSPLIT :frogsiren:
There has always been more than one Fediverse. Different instances make different moderation decisions so some instances can't see posts by some users.
There has only ever been one Bluesky because every ATProto frontend uses the same Appview.
It is January 2026 and that's no longer true; Blacksky's Appview is available for beta use and there is at least 1 user banned on Bluesky but not Blacksky. And vice versa.
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:w4xbfzo7kqfes5zb7r6qv3rw/post/3mcozwdhjos2b
@mcc Do you not find the login UI for https://blacksky.community and https://bsky.app a bit concerning? Because if you fill in a “custom server” you are now sending your password from one app view to a different server? If you host your own PDS do you only ever send that pw to your own servers?
-
This is why—although, now Blacksky is letting me "see through" Bluesky's worst moderation decisions, I'm glad, because Bluesky's moderation is weird and arbitrary—I think it's a downside of the network, and Mastodon made the right decision not offering this feature. Fediverse defederation forces a degree of soft group consensus on moderation: it's possible to say "if you're talking to X, I don't want to talk to *you*". On Bluesky we are all ghosts walking through walls and this can't be enforced
Fediverse defederation forces a degree of soft group consensus on moderation: it's possible to say "if you're talking to X, I don't want to talk to you".
How? If server A blocks server B, and neither server blocks server C, server C can still interact with both servers A and B. Server A could of course choose to also block server C for not blocking server B, but this would have to be done manually (you can't necessarily tell if server C blocks server B, since blocklists are often not public and not all interactions are public either) and I don't see how it's forced.
-
Fediverse defederation forces a degree of soft group consensus on moderation: it's possible to say "if you're talking to X, I don't want to talk to you".
How? If server A blocks server B, and neither server blocks server C, server C can still interact with both servers A and B. Server A could of course choose to also block server C for not blocking server B, but this would have to be done manually (you can't necessarily tell if server C blocks server B, since blocklists are often not public and not all interactions are public either) and I don't see how it's forced.
@noisytoot It's possible for A to figure out C's blocks and take action. C might choose to make that hard, but A might choose to treat hiding the blocks as suspicious. Or just talk to people and ask them what the blocks are.
By contrast on Bluesky it's not possible to do any of this. Not "it's not automatic", not "it's potentially hard", it's impossible. Any account can be on any PDS can be on any appview, there are no walls or fences, the instance is not present as a moderation abstraction.
-
:frogsiren: BLUESKY HAS OFFICIALLY NETSPLIT :frogsiren:
There has always been more than one Fediverse. Different instances make different moderation decisions so some instances can't see posts by some users.
There has only ever been one Bluesky because every ATProto frontend uses the same Appview.
It is January 2026 and that's no longer true; Blacksky's Appview is available for beta use and there is at least 1 user banned on Bluesky but not Blacksky. And vice versa.
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:w4xbfzo7kqfes5zb7r6qv3rw/post/3mcozwdhjos2b
@mcc oh that's sick. congrats to blacksky for making it
Ciao! Sembra che tu sia interessato a questa conversazione, ma non hai ancora un account.
Stanco di dover scorrere gli stessi post a ogni visita? Quando registri un account, tornerai sempre esattamente dove eri rimasto e potrai scegliere di essere avvisato delle nuove risposte (tramite email o notifica push). Potrai anche salvare segnalibri e votare i post per mostrare il tuo apprezzamento agli altri membri della comunità.
Con il tuo contributo, questo post potrebbe essere ancora migliore 💗
Registrati Accedi