I would like to give an update on "federation" on Bluesky.
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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 a in terms of DB replication could it be kind of Scuttlebutt, but with VC backing them? hehehe
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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 People love to call the fediverse hard and complicated but ATProto looks so overengineered to me
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: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.
Rudy wants revolution. (@rude1.blacksky.team)
Bluesky runs an appview. Blacksky runs an appview. A complete appview is a several terabytes sized database of the >18 billion follows, likes and posts of all bsky users, ever and forever. To run a different appview is to make a fork in bsky’s timeline. One has new posts from Łink. One doesn’t.
Bluesky Social (bsky.app)
@mcc Nice! I seem to recall a prediction that ATProto would slowly evolve to become closer to ActivityPub because the supposed "bugs" of the fediverse are actually features to make it manageable. Eventually, once they strip it of all its oddities, they may be able to reimplement BS in ActivityPub.
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: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.
Rudy wants revolution. (@rude1.blacksky.team)
Bluesky runs an appview. Blacksky runs an appview. A complete appview is a several terabytes sized database of the >18 billion follows, likes and posts of all bsky users, ever and forever. To run a different appview is to make a fork in bsky’s timeline. One has new posts from Łink. One doesn’t.
Bluesky Social (bsky.app)
If I'm not completely mistaken, any community on a social network that longs for a competent moderation, and wants to avoid the risk of their platform being pulled away from under their feet, needs to take things into their own hands.
It might be hosted by another community, but insisting on its own needs may create conflict, and a perception of it coming up with whataboutisms, on the hosting platform.
The Fediverse answer is to spin up a community-focused server.
Am I completely mistaken thinking that the ATProto answer is, ultimately, to take running an instance of the complete stack into its own hands?
Still struggling to understand how many communities would have the stamina to do it this way, compared to, lets say, firing up its own Mastodon instance and be good.
What am I missing?
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If I'm not completely mistaken, any community on a social network that longs for a competent moderation, and wants to avoid the risk of their platform being pulled away from under their feet, needs to take things into their own hands.
It might be hosted by another community, but insisting on its own needs may create conflict, and a perception of it coming up with whataboutisms, on the hosting platform.
The Fediverse answer is to spin up a community-focused server.
Am I completely mistaken thinking that the ATProto answer is, ultimately, to take running an instance of the complete stack into its own hands?
Still struggling to understand how many communities would have the stamina to do it this way, compared to, lets say, firing up its own Mastodon instance and be good.
What am I missing?
@katzenberger Bluesky has a concept of a "labeler" or "composable moderation". Without running the entire stack, you can run a server that "adds" moderation. Someone can subscribe to your "labeler", and anyone you've modded as banned or "allowed, but apply a clickthrough warning on their posts" shows up as modded that way to your subscriber. Bluesky PBLLC believes this fixes all problems. They think they can do flippant moderation, and anyone who wants more moderation can layer it on themselves.
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@katzenberger Bluesky has a concept of a "labeler" or "composable moderation". Without running the entire stack, you can run a server that "adds" moderation. Someone can subscribe to your "labeler", and anyone you've modded as banned or "allowed, but apply a clickthrough warning on their posts" shows up as modded that way to your subscriber. Bluesky PBLLC believes this fixes all problems. They think they can do flippant moderation, and anyone who wants more moderation can layer it on themselves.
@katzenberger In practice, I think this does not work, and Bluesky PBLLC is abdicating duty. There are several problems with the approach.
1. The labeler concept is *additive*, not *subtractive*. You cannot unsubscribe from Bluesky's default moderation server UNLESS you create your own, complete, stack…
2. …and MANY of the default moderation decisions are weird.
3. The "3000 friends" problem; someone moderated by a labeler can easily recruit people not yet "labeled" from Bluesky's larger pool
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@katzenberger In practice, I think this does not work, and Bluesky PBLLC is abdicating duty. There are several problems with the approach.
1. The labeler concept is *additive*, not *subtractive*. You cannot unsubscribe from Bluesky's default moderation server UNLESS you create your own, complete, stack…
2. …and MANY of the default moderation decisions are weird.
3. The "3000 friends" problem; someone moderated by a labeler can easily recruit people not yet "labeled" from Bluesky's larger pool
@mcc @katzenberger
4. It still doesn't prevent bluesky from seeing everything that is happening, which is how tech companies make money. I'm pretty sure this is by design -
@mcc @coracinho @falken This is the best writeup on bluesky's decentralization I've seen which gets very in the weeds. Christine is an expert on decentralized communication and one of the authors of the ActivityPub spec that powers fedi so I don't think you'll find a better analysis
https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/ -
@gbargoud Sure. You could do that. I'm aware of a patch to the PDS (backend) software that allows it to flat out publish via ActivityPub. I haven't seen a *frontend* that merges the streams yet though.
There's also the problem that you can't reeeallly monitor *just part* of the Bluesky network. To follow part of it you're supposed to drink the entire firehose and filter out the parts you care about.
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This post is 4 months old hehe.
At this moment we are making our own red dwarf style post fetching, wich is done directly on the PDS
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The biggest movement on this front has come from the community formerly known as Black Twitter, which now has complete, viable alternative dupes of the whole stack:
Rudy wants revolution. (@rude1.blacksky.team)
blacksky.app → pds atproto.africa → relay blacksky.community → app @blackskyweb.xyz → moderation @tektite.cc → migration assembly.blacksky.community → governance blackskyweb.xyz → marketing website rsky.satnav.dev → exported data explorer https://blacksky.community
Blacksky (blacksky.community)
This makes intuitive sense to me! My first question, looking at ATP, is "why do free dev for this protocol, controlled by one corporation, when Fediverse is right there and is more complete?". But the black dev community, from everything I saw, tried to adopt Fediverse *first* and basically got harassed off.
Worth noting that Blacksky has a unique lineage from Black Twitter. Rudy mentions in interviews that he wasn't much of a social media user before starting work on Blacksky and, if I recall right, didn't know much about Twitter or the community there.
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Worth noting that Blacksky has a unique lineage from Black Twitter. Rudy mentions in interviews that he wasn't much of a social media user before starting work on Blacksky and, if I recall right, didn't know much about Twitter or the community there.
@whattheflux This is true but the thing is what makes blacksky blacksky is the broader community, if he wasn't acting in concert with a community rudy would just be Northsky
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@gbargoud Sure. You could do that. I'm aware of a patch to the PDS (backend) software that allows it to flat out publish via ActivityPub. I haven't seen a *frontend* that merges the streams yet though.
There's also the problem that you can't reeeallly monitor *just part* of the Bluesky network. To follow part of it you're supposed to drink the entire firehose and filter out the parts you care about.
is there any chance you know where i could find such a patch?
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is there any chance you know where i could find such a patch?
@emmatebibyte @gbargoud Talk to M. Kasprzak / https://bsky.app/profile/distraction.engineer
Also, you are on wafrn, which is sort of this already
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@emmatebibyte @gbargoud Talk to M. Kasprzak / https://bsky.app/profile/distraction.engineer
Also, you are on wafrn, which is sort of this already
im working on something of my own
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@falken @Eliot_L @coracinho There is a very compelling Twitch clone called "stream.place" that uses Bluesky accounts and although the site itself is great, the way that things like chat work is that they have an incoming feed of THE ENTIRETY OF BLUESKY, and they just grep it for content posted that happens to be in the streamplace chat lexicon. This is. Absurd. It obliterates hopes of self-hosting. It will scale worse and worse if Bluesky ever gets more popular. It is blockchain to me.
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@falken @Eliot_L @coracinho There is a very compelling Twitch clone called "stream.place" that uses Bluesky accounts and although the site itself is great, the way that things like chat work is that they have an incoming feed of THE ENTIRETY OF BLUESKY, and they just grep it for content posted that happens to be in the streamplace chat lexicon. This is. Absurd. It obliterates hopes of self-hosting. It will scale worse and worse if Bluesky ever gets more popular. It is blockchain to me.
@falken @Eliot_L @coracinho What if you had a messaging system that worked by everyone posting messages to each other on their own personal html sites, because you had one server that was scraping the entire internet continuously and then a second server that was monitoring the feed of all scrapes and filtering out things that looked like messages from your friends to you. That is what bluesky has built.
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@falken @Eliot_L @coracinho What if you had a messaging system that worked by everyone posting messages to each other on their own personal html sites, because you had one server that was scraping the entire internet continuously and then a second server that was monitoring the feed of all scrapes and filtering out things that looked like messages from your friends to you. That is what bluesky has built.
@falken @coracinho @mcc I think all of this trouble was supposedly to solve the missing reply issue that's present on fedi but seemingly it might not even be a complete solution in a world where there are multiple appviews? Not sure if I understand the new problem here completely but also, I think on mastodon there have been attempts to reduce the missing reply issue without giving up message passing architecture?
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@falken @coracinho @mcc I think all of this trouble was supposedly to solve the missing reply issue that's present on fedi but seemingly it might not even be a complete solution in a world where there are multiple appviews? Not sure if I understand the new problem here completely but also, I think on mastodon there have been attempts to reduce the missing reply issue without giving up message passing architecture?
@Eliot_L uhhhh so, i don't know what you're responding to
i wonder if this is related to the same missing reply issue you're talking abt (i don't understand much about tech). i've had a friend of mine say they couldn't see what i was tagging them in before -
@Eliot_L uhhhh so, i don't know what you're responding to
i wonder if this is related to the same missing reply issue you're talking abt (i don't understand much about tech). i've had a friend of mine say they couldn't see what i was tagging them in before@coracinho The best solution I know to this issue is to view the thread on the OP's instance which should have all the replies. Mastodon has an "open original page" option on posts to do this, not sure about other fediverse apps. But the problem is when you don't notice the missing replies, nobody is going to think to do that.
