@pixel the fact that they do this through the discord and not through their own social media thing sure shows a lot of faith in the thing they are creating
@pixel that’s how they’ve been doing from the very beginning. Starting small and controlled to resolve issues that arise in the process, while progressively opening and eventually remove all constraints. The invitation system was part of this process.
@ErikUden I guess they want to limit things before doing a wide release of things, instead having a gradual opening of federation.
That said, most Bluesky users don't really care, they want their 1:1 Twitter copy and they aren't even getting that with all the features missing at the moment.
@pixel@ErikUden Kinda like the thought that some poor soul may be putting all these instance names in Google Sheets or something that each other instance is then hard coded to lookup and check against before allowing federation with that other instance.
@mikwee I'm not even exactly sure how the protocol works in that regard, a lot of the graphics I have seen somewhat still include a centralized entity so I'm not really sure how non-Bluesky federation could be accomplished.
@pixel@mikwee here you go. Even if you don’t agree with how it’s done, it’s still an interesting paper that explains all the basic concepts and how decentralized federation can be achieved.
@mikwee@fenarinarsa to be fair, I think the custom feeds are a pretty nifty thing in Bluesky.
A thing I am a bit iffy about is that Bluesky is VC-funded, and even with the entire open nature...when the investors expect returns to be made, things could go iffy.
Of course, federation might be more advanced and stuff only affects the PBS-run services, but it's still something to think about.
@pixel@mikwee yup but on the other side Bluesky is a public benefit company, which, if I understood the concept right, means they have a mission and that they can go against the shareholders' interest if it's against their mission.
I think their defined mission is to "build the next generation social networks" but I can't find the exact quote.
Anyway the fact that everything is FOSS and that you can migrate your account without the origin instance's cooperation are better ways to achieve user independance than on any other networks.
@pixel@mikwee As a matter of fact, I think there's actually already two implementation of PDS, the official one another third party one. But again I don't have sources, I just read that a few months ago when they opened the federation on the sandbox network.
@pixel@mikwee Also, that's a complete personal opinion, but during the last year they didn't stop saying that opening federation was the #1 objective, even before working on private E2E accounts and DM, videos etc.
To me it looks like they wanted to be sure people could be free of Bluesky as soon as possible in the case they became the bad guy.
And they actually did say that they're working against a potential future bad Bluesky.
@fenarinarsa@mikwee I looked at the paper and while I can definitely see federation of ATProto stuff being fine at some point, it'a also a bit concerning that's theres so many parts involved.
ActivityPub is far from perfect, but it only requires the software sending out and receiving messages.
Bluesky's plans on the paper have the PDSses, Relays, Firehoses and then the actual clients.
@pixel@mikwee There's many concerns about this, like the relays can only be ran by organizations that have the means to run them (it takes a lot of resources).
On the other side it already scales a lot better than ActivityPub. Their goal is to make something that can scale up to hundreds of millions of accounts, something AP is unable to do.
@fenarinarsa@mikwee well, in a network that is spread out relatively far you don't have to/need to go about processing millions of accounts.
and who knows, maybe AP or whatever it's successor might be in the future (since I don't think it's the end of it either) will improve on those aspects that AP has been lacking in.
@pixel@mikwee Basically ActivityPub is not a protocol made to create a social network, it's a protocol enabling communication between individual social or data services (like Wordpress).
They just send messages to each others to advertise that there's a new content, that someone wants to (un-)subcribe to a feed, and that's more or less all about it really. It's like notifications between servers, then it's up to the servers to keep copies in cache etc.
Protocol-wise it's based on http, which is easier to implement but also adds overhead.
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