I would like to give an update on "federation" on Bluesky.
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@mcc technically mastodon dot social could grow big enough to also become this kind of dickface. but i'm talking hypothetical, you're talking reality. with more fragmentation, bsky would become stronger as a network. this is a message we can push on bsky central itself.
@lritter I think this happening with m.s is a real risk, but the thing I'd point to to say it hasn't happened in practice is that m.s is probably the most blocked instance and none of the instances blocking m.s seem unhappy!
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If you sign up with https://blacksky.community you get:
- Blacksky's "appview"/web frontend
- Optionally, Blacksky's PDS
- Blacksky's moderation layer (and you can optionally enable Bluesky's too)Almost-complete independence! What I'm not clear on is to whether, or to what degree Blacksky relies on Bluesky's "relay":
(EDIT 2: There was an edit here with corrections, but I've removed that because the corrections may have been less correct than the original.)
@mcc Right now, its only Blacksky's feeds that are using their own relay.
They're not currently running their own AppView (although a lot of people are confused about this -- I even saw Masnick get it wrong) .
EDIT: although maybe I got it wrong too, and they actually are? See the discussions.
ANOTHER EDIT, 10/7: it now seems like I was corrrect. whew. But it really is a confusing situation!
They're working on this and saying it should be out fairly soon, at which point I believe the plan is to have blacksky.community switch over (or maybe offer the choice of which AppView to use, the way deer.social currently does). I assume their AppView will use their own Relay but haven't verified this.
Another current dependency is on Bluesky's platform-level moderation, the automatied scanning for CSAM, malware, and spam. At the technical level it's easily replaceable -- Bluesky outsources it -- but it's not cheap (especially since video is supported); Rudy estimated $160,000/year.
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@mcc For my own understanding: while the server architecture is different, the same thing could happen on the Fediverse, right? (Except portability is worse.) The only thing saving it is that mastodon.social is only the plurality of users, maybe a majority, but not the overwhelming majority?
@jrose I mean, observably, a *lot* of servers are outright blocking mastodon.social and the users seem entirely happy.
The question is whether a non mothership community can be viable without the mothership. That's the case on Mastodon. Bluesky isn't close and we're only now starting to see *movement toward* it getting close. The difference between 51% and 99.9% is meaningful.
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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 I'm not the person to ask. I would join the Bluesky API Touchers discord (yes, it's really named that) and ask there.
Blacksky has all their software on GitHub (they are using a mix of original Bluesky software and their own stuff) but not instructions on how to deploy it as a whole stack.
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@mcc Right now, its only Blacksky's feeds that are using their own relay.
They're not currently running their own AppView (although a lot of people are confused about this -- I even saw Masnick get it wrong) .
EDIT: although maybe I got it wrong too, and they actually are? See the discussions.
ANOTHER EDIT, 10/7: it now seems like I was corrrect. whew. But it really is a confusing situation!
They're working on this and saying it should be out fairly soon, at which point I believe the plan is to have blacksky.community switch over (or maybe offer the choice of which AppView to use, the way deer.social currently does). I assume their AppView will use their own Relay but haven't verified this.
Another current dependency is on Bluesky's platform-level moderation, the automatied scanning for CSAM, malware, and spam. At the technical level it's easily replaceable -- Bluesky outsources it -- but it's not cheap (especially since video is supported); Rudy estimated $160,000/year.
@jdp23 "They're not even running their own appview"
I don't understand. What is the website I have been using to access bluesky for the last month, then?
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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 do you think this work (on Blacksky or northsky's part) will lead to more independent atproto towers showing up in the future?
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@jdp23 "They're not even running their own appview"
I don't understand. What is the website I have been using to access bluesky for the last month, then?
@mcc it's a client (aka app) that uses an appview -- currently the Bluesky appview
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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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@jrose I mean, observably, a *lot* of servers are outright blocking mastodon.social and the users seem entirely happy.
The question is whether a non mothership community can be viable without the mothership. That's the case on Mastodon. Bluesky isn't close and we're only now starting to see *movement toward* it getting close. The difference between 51% and 99.9% is meaningful.
@mcc @jrose and I'm pretty sure m.s isn't even close to 51% anyways, whether in terms of total accounts or active accounts. I think it's more like 30%ish eyeballing fedidb.com's stats.
There are over 30k distinct activitypub servers out there, all with their own moderation policies, for better or worse.
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@mcc @jrose and I'm pretty sure m.s isn't even close to 51% anyways, whether in terms of total accounts or active accounts. I think it's more like 30%ish eyeballing fedidb.com's stats.
There are over 30k distinct activitypub servers out there, all with their own moderation policies, for better or worse.
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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
A Full-Network Relay for $34 a Month | bryan newbold
This is an update to a Summer 2024 blog post. At the time, atproto relays required a cache of the full network on local disk to validate data structures. With the Sync v1.1 updates, relays don't need all that disk I/O. What impact does that have on hosting setup and operating costs? Turns out the d...
(whtwnd.com)
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@mcc @jrose I suspect their share goes up when there's a mass migration event and goes down otherwise, because in a mass migration event people want the easy answer and that's the easy answer the Mastodon website gives them. But otherwise there's probably a lot of accounts on m.s that don't stick around, while people on other instances might be more sticky (at least unless their instance shuts down).
It's been a while since one of those migrations came here so I think overall that's probably correct.
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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 @jrose I suspect their share goes up when there's a mass migration event and goes down otherwise, because in a mass migration event people want the easy answer and that's the easy answer the Mastodon website gives them. But otherwise there's probably a lot of accounts on m.s that don't stick around, while people on other instances might be more sticky (at least unless their instance shuts down).
It's been a while since one of those migrations came here so I think overall that's probably correct.
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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
