cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/5484255
February 22, 2024 Bluesky writes:
Up until now, every user on the network used a Bluesky PDS (Personal Data Server) to host their data. We’ve already federated our own data hosting on the backend, both to help operationally scale our service, and to prove out the technical underpinnings of an openly federated network. But today we’re opening up federation for anyone else to begin connecting with the network.
The PDS, in many ways, fulfills a simple role: it hosts your account and gives you the ability to log in, it holds the signing keys for your data, and it keeps your data online and highly available. Unlike a Mastodon instance, it does not need to function as a full-fledged social media service. We wanted to make atproto data hosting—like web hosting—into a fairly simple commoditized service. The PDS’s role has been limited in scope to achieve this goal. By limiting the scope, the role of a PDS in maintaining an open and fluid data network has become all the more powerful.
We’ve packaged the PDS into a friendly distribution with an installer script that handles much of the complexity of setting up a PDS. After you set up your PDS and join the PDS Admins Discord to submit a request for your PDS to be added to the network, your PDS’s data will get routed to other services in the network (like feed generators and the Bluesky Appview) through our Relay, the firehose provider. Check out our Federation Overview for more information on how data flows through the atproto network.
So it’s a centrally controlled network? That doesn’t really seem like proper federation protocol.
Or is it only to federate with their main instance? Meaning InstanceX and InstanceY can still federate with each other even without approval from the overlords.
I haven’t dug into the details, but there seem to be a lot of blog posts and extensive documentation to figure it out.
It’s not centrally controlled, though. The main instance doesn’t automatically federate with everyone, just like Lemmy used to refuse federation unless other servers were whitelisted.
You can set up a network of Bluesky servers without ever federating with the main Bluesky server if you want. You’ll just have no users.
The more I’m reading into the docs, the more convinced I am that the AT protocol is better than ActivityPub.
I wonder if there cound be a link aggregator and forum style implementation of the AT protocol, the same way that Lemmy did with the ActivityPub protocol.
I wonder what sort of bridging can be implemented between AT Protocol and ActivityPub implementations.
That’s because AT was very deliberately designed to solve problems with ActivityPub.
The folks over at https://fed.brid.gy/ have been working at this. Much to the chagrin of the folks over at Mastodon.
AT has a lot of nice parts, and a lot of “wtf why” parts.
It makes sense: AT was designed to be “Twitter, but also federateable” rather than ActivityPub’s “Federateable, so you can build things like Twitter”. ActivityPub is modular and much more customisable than AT, which was built closer to existing social media concepts.
I’ve read somewhere that Friendica is working on an AT implementation, so I guess we’ll see how well federation actually works once that’s done.
It will be interesting to see what Friendica devs come up with!
I’ve just started looking at the AT protocol. What sort of WTF things are in there?
The inclusion of some kind of web3 identifier that never seemed to get used for web3 things comes to mind. The methodology of most federation work also seems to indicate that hosting an alternative server may require significantly more resources compared to an ActivityPub server, though this may be outdated information.
I also don’t particularly like their moderation strategy. It seems very Nostr-like, and it’s more about hiding things than actually blocking things.
They also felt like they needed to invent their own notation language to describe their protocol, which makes reading the protocol spec kind of weird.
They also decided to use Javascript’s 53 bits of integer precision as an upper bound for their protocol. I certainly wouldn’t have designed my cross-platform protocol around the programming language I happened to choose.
Lastly, Bluesky offers a flag to suggest clients hide your profile and posts, but doesn’t have the ability to hide that data. With ActivityPub, you can simply refuse to list posts and maintain some amount of privacy (especially combined with enabling follow requests), but AT doesn’t seem to care much about that.
Yeah, from some cursory glances and following of AT devs, some things I understand the logic of and some things I’m thinking “isn’t this a bit over-engineered?”
My basic question is whether the problems that needed solving about Twitter and other corporate social networks really have anything to do with software engineering at the end of the day.
Writing the code is honestly the easiest part in all probability. It is the other parts like community ownership, resiliency against corporate capture and human moderation that takes into consideration complex contexts etc… that are the truly hard parts and Bluesky really says almost nothing (at least worth trusting as more than words) new along those vital metrics (chiefly because it is an investor backed for-profit venture).
I think the moderation will be an uphill battle for Bluesky. I haven’t seen a clear answer over how legal issues are going to be handled and generally, people want some form of moderation. Maybe not the extent that the fediverse has with its blocking drama.
But the resiliency against corporate capture and community ownership, meh I’m not really worried. I work with and use open-source projects that have been backed by corporations, Mastodon.social has already said they wish to federate with Threads, and there are corporations sponsoring (in the case of mastodonapp.uk) or outright owning instances (in the case of Flipboard, Mozilla Social and Vivaldi Social). Bluesky seems to be built on the notion that it too will be a possible adversary in the future, so the protocol is being built with that in mind.
You have to explain to me why you think massive tech corporations are going to behave differently here than they always do. Every large tech company behaves like Microsoft after a certain size in terms of values and actions, and they will do their best to mine the valuable aspects of the fediverse out and silo them away in a way that can be monetized.
I consider Flipboard or Mozilla owning instances to be a far different question because these are relatively small corporations, they aren’t Meta, they don’t have more cash on hand than entire countries.
Moderation is the hard part about social media, who gets to moderate, how moderation is handled between communities and how much human moderation genuinely happens from within the context of communities are all the important questions.
Again, what happens when Bluesky’s investor’s come knocking and want monetization? At that point is the CEO really just going to say “we can’t do that, it would give us more profits but it would be wrong to undercut the openness of Bluesky!”. It is frankly ridiculous to assume this would happen, the same story will play out that always plays out here.
You can either make huge amounts of money off of social media and payback your investors or you can make a healthy community, pick one. Unless you are a massive corporation with a lottttt of investors to please, then there was never really a choice no matter how long your investors let you attempt to fool your customers into thinking so before you hit the gas on cashing in (Reddit).
This all implies Bluesky can be considered a massive tech corp (which it honestly isn’t even with investors, definitely not compared to Meta, or even Mozilla at this point), and can even be monetised.
In the event that they do attempt that, users can move to a different PDS and not lose any of their data - that’s how AT was built. While on AP, it’s dependent on if the software powering the account supports migration, and even then I’ve not seen an implementation that carries over all of the user’s data (Mastodon only does followers/following, Lemmy has no migration whatsoever). That’s not to say it’s impossible, but I’ve not seen it happen.