I would like to give an update on "federation" on Bluesky.
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There's some info about costs in https://infosec.exchange/@thenexusofprivacy/115200210981454279 and https://infosec.exchange/@thenexusofprivacy/115204185294385151
Moderation is certainly a big problem, that's driving a lot of the momentum for independent infrascture.
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@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.
@mcc @aeva Even if Blacksky has full coverage of the stack (or will soon), your point about bsky controlling well over 90% of the users means that their moderation rulings are effectively universal.
It's cool if folks are able to run their own standalone implementations, but a couple of those on the far edges of a large centralized system does not a truly federated network make, as we have seen time and time again over the years (XMPP comes to mind...).
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@mcc Bluesky is a venture capital shit show in the making. The rug pull will happen in the next decade.
I did not know about the fighting between black devs and the queer community.??? What is the lore there.
Cuz it sux that they went the way of atproto over activity pub.
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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@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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@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.
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
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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
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)
@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
