Bluesky has announced that today they have started with federation, allowing anyone to host their own data on the #bluesky network.
In a blog post they announced that anyone can now host their own PDS, framing it as a way to control your own data, and also explaining how it differs from Mastodon.
Bluesky describes it as an 'early access of federation for self-hosters'.
New: #Bluesky opens network, making it a massive hit in Japan
Bluesky's network grew by 50% in the last two days, adding 1.5million accounts since dropping the invite codes. The surge of popularity and interest seems to come mainly from Japan, with large popular Japanese accounts coming over.
Bluesky also talks more about their plans to make money, and how they will start with federation this month. With that, bridges to the #fediverse become possible.
Small note: if you check feeds like 'Discovery' and wonder what the hell I'm talking about with all these Japanese posts: make sure that all languages are checked in your settings. AFAIK if you are not Japanese it is most likely turned off by default, making it that you don't see posts in Japanese.
Starting today, Bluesky will not require invite codes anymore and anyone can join the network. Later this month, the team will roll out an "experimental early version of federation", allowing other people to run their own 'Personal Data Server' (PDS).
Latest dotSocial podcast has me wondering if it'd be cool to be able to have Administrators create "topics" in Trending and support inviting specific people to be curators of those topics on the local mastodon instance?
check out @newsmast, they are going big on curated feeds, and doing some really cool work. They're about to release more updates and are working on API support as well. I'll be writing more about it next week
I write about social networks (beyond just fediverse stuff) more broadly at my personal website, which is where I first published this story about Bluesky (https://laurenshof.online/bluesky-has-3-million-accounts-invites-going-away-soon/ ). I sometimes include stories and coverage from beyond the fediverse in the weekly Fediverse Report when I feel that it has direct impact on the fediverse.
Bluesky saying they'll remove the invite system soon is one of those cases, so thats why I included it in this weeks update
@bedirthan also on a more practical note, I was planning on writing about Friendica's new Bluesky connector this week as well, so there would have been more of a thematic cohesion between the stories. I simply ran out of time for this week, so that'll come soon
The massive response to the launch of RSS Parrot, a new tool which allows you to view RSS feeds in your fediverse account, showcases the large demand for better integration of the fediverse with RSS
With a bonus shoutout for all the scuba divers on the fediverse: diveDB is a web app that allows scuba divers to track their dives. The site has now added ActivityPub support, so you can follow all your favourite scuba divers (?) directly from your fediverse app
There will be bugs, probably many bugs. When you see one, please reply to the welcome email you received, with info about it, or report it in the issue queue. Let’s catch ’em all!
#Python developers are invited to check out the code repository at https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi. In coming days I’ll write better setup instructions and put together a code walk-through screencast.
Thank you to all of you who joined the #PeerTubeAMA livestream, this was great fun. Great to see so many people tune in and ask all these questions, thanks a lot!
If you want to receive these updates during the week directly into your fediverse feed, you can follow me at @LaurensHof. The WordPress blog has been connected to the fediverse for a while now, but I'm starting to make more active use of it.
All of these shorter articles will also be boosted from this account to make things even easier, so they'll just show up in your microblogging client of choice.
@spudart Mastodon does not have any system in place to warn against fake accounts. Most servers either ban them, or defederate from servers who do not ban impersonator accounts
With the excellent news that all accounts on WordPress.com can now connect with the fediverse, it seems like a good moment to mention that Fediverse Report has had this feature enabled for a while as well.
You can follow me directly at @LaurensHof to see all the blog posts directly in your fediverse feeds.
I've also started a personal blog about decentralised social networks more broadly, with the ActivityPub plugin enabled. You can follow me there at @laurenshof
Enabling a fediverse connection on your WordPress blog allows for an interesting short-ish form of writing:
Space for your own thoughts and arguments, moving beyond just a hot take
Keeping it slightly limited so it fits well within the structure of microblogging
Bluesky is undergoing a period of significant growth: mid September saw the network hitting 1 million accounts, and another 400k in the four weeks since.
Bluesky announced that the architecture for federation is now ready, and said they will start (internal) federation in the next few weeks. They will start federation with new servers (PDS) that are run by the Bluesky team, with open federation coming later.
His latest update (https://snarfed.org/2023-10-06_bridgy-fed-status-update-7) shows already how far along this is, and that is without the Bluesky protocol being 'finished', it does not even federate yet. As soon as Bluesky is finished and is really a decentralised protocol, I'd expect that there is a functional connection between both Mastodon and Bluesky. That won't really happen as long as Bluesky is still invite-only, but pretty soon after I'd guess.
The best comparison is between Mastodon and Nostr. Both are also separate networks that officially do not communicate with each other. However, there is a fully functional 'bridge', which allows you to follow people (and comment etc) who are on the Nostr network directly from your Mastodon account, and visa versa.
I'd expect something similar to happen between Bluesky and the fediverse as well.
Great question btw, and sorry for the long answer haha
@peterbutler theyve given an extremely informal and very rough guess as to EOY for when their internal infrastructure is ready to handle 10M accounts. So I doubt its before EOY. Beyond that, I have no idea.