I would like to give an update on "federation" on Bluesky.
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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.
@mcc I'm sorry that I'm too much of a fedi noob. What lead to it failing here? Defederating? Not enough people? Where could I read more on this? It sounds like it was a big hurdle to get parity with bluesky so I'm curious on what lead them to do that?
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@boris what about "Takedowns on accounts and records apply on the API level regardless of the labeler headers."?
Paul Frazee (@pfrazee.com)
Okay I got some answers. Takedowns on accounts apply on the PDS level. Takedowns on accounts and records apply on the API level regardless of the labeler headers. I’ll explain why and share some thoughts in next posts
Bluesky Social (bsky.app)
It really sounds like user data/content is being made inaccessible at the source, but I'm out of my depth here.
@makeworld yes I’m not disagreeing!
The “source” is where someone’s account is hosted - a PDS. So, bsky PDS vs somewhere else.
And then the API end points would again be a PDS or appview hosted by someone.
If you’re on your own PDS anyone can fetch from you directly.
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@mcc I'm sorry that I'm too much of a fedi noob. What lead to it failing here? Defederating? Not enough people? Where could I read more on this? It sounds like it was a big hurdle to get parity with bluesky so I'm curious on what lead them to do that?
@KnightMustard "What lead to it failing here?"
What lead to what failing?
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May be a stupid question but I don't know enough about ATProto, ActivityPub or Bluesky infrastructure to be sure
Would it be possible for one of those systems that is forking Bluesky to make it so they use both ATProto and ActivityPub streams so they can be on here without a bridge?
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@KnightMustard "What lead to it failing here?"
What lead to what failing?
@mcc You mentioned they got harassed off Fediverse? Perhaps I'm over complicating it?
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@boris "Bsky doesn’t have auth on your account and can’t delete individual posts."
This is true in my case because I self host a PDS. Most users use a Bluesky PBC hosted PDS. In this case, Bluesky owns everything, they have the keys, the bits are resident on their servers. What prevents them from deleting a post? Aren't they legally bound to delete posts in case of DMCA takedown, CSAM, etc?
@mcc for illegal content (what is described as network abuse & infra moderation here https://docs.bsky.app/blog/blueskys-moderation-architecture) they likely take down the entire account
Yes Bsky _could_ delete posts by like … accessing the blob directory or deleting/editing SQLlite on disk but that’s tinkering. There’s no like masquerade as Boris function to do this in any sort of consolidated way across accounts.
Just like Google _could_ delete something in GDrive.
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@mcc You mentioned they got harassed off Fediverse? Perhaps I'm over complicating it?
@KnightMustard No. I am saying a different group of people got harassed, a few years back, and I saw people leave the Fediverse as a result. My perception, which obviously is the perception of an outsider and so not trustworthy, is that black Fedi is smaller now than it used to be.
Rudy says he's never used Fedi.
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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 thanks for this!
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@benroyce @txtechnician @mcc the funding is an interesting one. If we don't hear anything new about another BSky funding round in the next 6 months they'll start being close to running dry (they're currently closing in on one year since the last round that was supposed to be for two years and had a failed one early 2025)
Some of these recent troubling decisions may already be influenced by that. They've said they want to start running ads and that has implications for moderation for example.
@ikuturso @benroyce @txtechnician @mcc
How much has actually been invested in Bluesky? Public information (https://accessipos.com/bluesky-stock-ipo/) is three rounds, a seed round and an $8M in 2023 and $15M (Blockchain Capital) in 2024. In January 2025 a round lead by Bain Capital (https://www.businessinsider.com/x-competitor-bluesky-valuation-new-funding-round-2025-1) was reported setting valuation at $700M, but no further info if that round closed has been reported. Is the total to date $23M plus seed accurate? What happened with the big January Bain Capital round?
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@ikuturso @benroyce @txtechnician @mcc
How much has actually been invested in Bluesky? Public information (https://accessipos.com/bluesky-stock-ipo/) is three rounds, a seed round and an $8M in 2023 and $15M (Blockchain Capital) in 2024. In January 2025 a round lead by Bain Capital (https://www.businessinsider.com/x-competitor-bluesky-valuation-new-funding-round-2025-1) was reported setting valuation at $700M, but no further info if that round closed has been reported. Is the total to date $23M plus seed accurate? What happened with the big January Bain Capital round?
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@mastodonmigration @ikuturso @txtechnician @mcc
good question
we can calibrate with earnings (what, about $0?), the length of time, and the nature of the lenders, and arrive at a nice measure of how close bluesky is to plutocrat destruction
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@aeva @cthos either you rely on bluesky to get the content (meaning you have to trust them to convey the content) or you prepare and mirror the content yourself. No real third option, fundamentally. If there were several blacksky-like towers then they could potentially pool resources, but no other actor has gotten as far as blacksky so there's no one to pool with.
This is just me thinking out loud without much direct knowledge, but isn't live Atmosphere content supposed to remain available on its home PDS indefinitely? So couldn't an AppView implement an LRU cache rather than a full mirror of all content? Or does this storage cost come from something else that can't be trivially re-fetched later?
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This is just me thinking out loud without much direct knowledge, but isn't live Atmosphere content supposed to remain available on its home PDS indefinitely? So couldn't an AppView implement an LRU cache rather than a full mirror of all content? Or does this storage cost come from something else that can't be trivially re-fetched later?
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@mastodonmigration @ikuturso @benroyce @mcc Wait!
I got it. What if we got the government to fund it! /s
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@mastodonmigration @ikuturso @benroyce @mcc Wait!
I got it. What if we got the government to fund it! /s
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@trwnh @mcc @ikuturso @jrose In
did:plc:foo, foo is abase32(sha256(creation_request))[0:20]so its a 120-bit hash. I’m not confident of that’s long term securityAlso the
did:plcupdate metadata protocol is fundamentally dependent upon the existence of a central trusted system so you can’t just easily replicate it as a DHT system@erincandescent @ikuturso @mcc @trwnh @jrose
It's vulnerable to collisions, but I don't think those get you much with PLC? (Only the author of a DID creation request could create the collision.)
For pre-image, it inherits the security properties of SHA-256, which is probably fine, unless you're willing to brute-force the full 120 bits, which is well out of range of foreseeable technology I think - the whole Bitcoin network does like 2^96 hashes of SHA-256 per *year*.
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That's a great point, and I'm guessing that what @cthos meant by "lightweight" AppView was precisely that it doesn't indefinitely store media - it either has a LRU cache or relies on the Bluesky PBC network's CDN.
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@fontenot @mcc @aeva whatever this thing is doing: https://github.com/alnkesq/AppViewLite
(I have not investigated past their readme)
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@fontenot @mcc @aeva whatever this thing is doing: https://github.com/alnkesq/AppViewLite
(I have not investigated past their readme)
Thanks! Yes, it looks like the 2 GB / day estimate was from early January, and they didn't implement the ability to cache images until February, so that's *just* for posts, replies, likes, etc, not a full mirror of the network.
(And in fact the image caching ability is on-demand, they don't get fetched from the PDS until someone using the AppView actually tries to view them. The software can also use the PBC's CDN.)
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@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.
@mnordhoff The DID concept is so strange to me, because they did already figure out they could use DNS for this…? So why bother?
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Update: Rudy who operates blacksky.community responded to this thread on bluesky. Above I said I wasn't clear on how independent Blacksky was of the Bluesky infra. His answer is "completely". They run their own relay (which scrapes PDSes itself), the relay feeds into their own appview, the appview feeds into their own client. https://bsky.app/profile/rude1.blacksky.team/post/3lyv5rwpc722c
And since they bridge end-to-end, in my Hypothetical Example above, they *could* choose to make different moderation decisions from Bluesky PBC.
@mcc what about the PLC DID directory?
AFAIK:
1) ‘blacksky community’ doesn’t have control over ‘their accounts’ as long as they don’t run their own directory.
2) running an ‘independent directory’ means: no zerocost migration between networks and no coherent communication between networks without bridging elements.
I find it distressing that, as of now, most bsky documentation still omits the fact that the directory underpins *everything*.
Paul Fuxjäger (@cypherhippie.bsky.social)
Looks like the component that carries ALL the weight of ‘credible exit’ marketing claims is exposed to increasing levels of spam/dos. *absolutely nobody* saw that coming. /SCNR Longterm viable ‘DID:PLC Registry Write Access Governance Model’, anyone? [contains quote post or other embedded content]
Bluesky Social (bsky.app)
