@hankg@atomicpoet What shocks me most about #BlueSky is the fact that moderation tools were more or less an afterthought. Even the most basic social networks have moderation tools to handle spam & trolls.
They're separate things. Federation is how posts travel between servers. Algorithms (in this context) is how they're displayed when they get there. 'Chronological ordering of posts by people I follow' is an algorithm. 'Everything on my server containing #ThisHashtag ' is another one. What BlueSky proposes is to make sorting and filtering algorithms a third-party service users can choose between at their end, and toggle on and off.
@atomicpoet So Chris even as a techie I need to lean on your expertise here… is it possible that Mastodon and BS can co exist in a way that if my local news TV stations and local paper start putting content on BS it could be seen in my Mastodon feed?
@markb
> is it possible that Mastodon and BS can co exist in a way that if my local news TV stations and local paper start putting content on BS it could be seen in my Mastodon feed?
Possible, certainly. Will it happen, who knows? Probably. Bridges are already being written to enable users of AP software (eg Mastodon) to connect with users of AT software (eg BlueSky). It depends if BS is cooperative with or obstructive of such efforts.
@strypey That’s kind of the feeling I have too. I really expected to see more traditional users of Twitter expand their content here but it really seems to have stalled. Now with BS becoming the new darling I fear it’s never going to happen and some kind of bridge similar to birdsite.makeup is the next best thing.
@atomicpoet It might be interesting to see what “long tail of partial-network providers. Small bespoke BGSs could also service tightly or well-defined slices of the network” ends up looking like.
"Bluesky is finally testing federation with "allow-listed servers""
This is how...Bluesky's AT protocol will work
1 Personal Data Server (PDS)
2 Big Graph Service (BGS)
3 App Views [created by the "allow-list" servers?]
1 There's a big firehose of data
2 It goes through the "prism" of app view [via alogorithm]
3 there's a[n algorith-generated feed] of what the user sees
@atomicpoet is it possible to see the thread on BS, or is it completely closed off for us outsiders? (honestly have no idea how the platform works at this point)
The response to this thread on Bluesky seems to be, “Saying that regular people should be able to afford a BGS is like saying they should afford to operate a web search engine”.
Indeed, that’s what I’m saying.
Funny enough, the Searx project makes this possible.
@TheVoyageur
> competing distributed social protocols could become religious wars
I'm seeing signs of this as people here react to the BlueSky beta in a way that suggests they see it as a threat. Those of us who've been here for a while know that competing protocols is just part of the way decentralized stuff evolves. Before ActivityPub there were Diaspora, OStatus, Friendica's original protocol (LFRN?), and Zot. Software running those is mostly dead (or dying), or running AP.
@strypey@atomicpoet I wasn't around this space when different protocols started federation. What did they technically do, have servers able to serve and request data in both protocol request formats?
@TheVoyageur
> What did they technically do, have servers able to serve and request data in both protocol request formats?
Initially there were distinct networks. Then some of the apps started implementing other protocols, particularly Friendica, Hubzilla, and SocialHome, leading to a hybrid network. Around that time, reps from as many apps as possible were brought together in a W3C process that led to the AP spec. Most apps implemented it.
@TheVoyageur
I forgot to mention the IndieWeb, which is another network again with its own set of minimalist protocols connecting personal websites into a social web. Some of them started linking into the fediverse too around the same time, through AP bridges like BridgyFed.
Looks more like they want to build a Google x AMP style relationship.
Your profiles and posts is the AMP server and the BGS is a Google-like service on top of it to save from having to worry about crashing servers and such.
@davidgarywood
> “the marketplace of algorithms” has a big “debate me in the marketplace of ideas” tone to it, to me
The latter is a metaphor. The former is a literal marketplace, like an app store, where you can choose the filtering algorithms you want to use, and pay to access them (although there may also be gratis ones).
@davidgarywood
If you like, we can debate whether “debate me in the marketplace of ideas” is a useful metaphor or not. But that's an entirely separate issue :)
@davidgarywood@atomicpoet to be honest, algorithms is a big missing piece of Mastodon for me. I just don't want to be beholden to one billionaire's algorithm.
@atomicpoet One of the things activitypub has going for it is that the first time I read the spec I was like “ok I can imagine how I’d write something that generated a bunch of posts someone else could subscribe to. AT is much harder to reason about and I’m not really seeing the benefit of that added complexity yet
Their idea of federation is totally different from that of the Fediverse. In the Fediverse you have thousands of instances (servers), they can be very low-cost to run, in Wordpress even as a free add-on plugin.
Due to the load of BlueSky's Big Graph Server (BGS), the costs of running them will be way too expensive 4 most (all?) people. Even if eventually there are multiple BGS servers, they will all be owned by corporations.
@atomicpoet
I think the BGS should be renamed to "Bottleneck Gateway Service".
That is what it looks like to me: Essentially caching (and likely filtering) all data, maybe selling access to that data (for machine learning/data mining purposes) to third parties.
@atomicpoet I'm not sure "resource-demanding" means it can't run on a Raspberry Pi.
Nor does it sound necessary from the descriptions.
This all sounds like Google AMP .sxg for posts and BGS's are just relay servers (like Google is for AMP .sxg).
My only worry is how a private page would work, but nobody seems to really have this sorted out (except for maybe SSB and that comes with large tradeoffs).
@atomicpoet Thanks for breaking it down. Basically, BlueSky miniaturized how the internet works 🤣 PDS = PC, BGS = Google, App View = Google's search algorithm. Nothing new, technically.
@atomicpoet Wow, near thread. I feel like we still haven't hit the sweet spot. ActivityPub is nice because of the low hardware req, but the data accumulated for say a Mastodon instance is still large.
AT/Nostr don't fix this, but it's the defining challenge I think.
@atomicpoet A few thoughts from a non-technical wonderer:
Does the announced profound need of recoding #Twitter imply it's going to apply and absorb AT-protocol, to federate first with #Bluesky and perhaps within itself too – on multiple server centers.
Who governs the AT-protocol, if it's not open-sourced (like #ActivityPub'ed #Fediverse )? Who owns it? Who's going to buy the core infra of such walled gardened #federation? 🤔
@atomicpoet glad to see it! The first attempts at a new thing can take a while to work out, so I was getting worried that since they hadn’t started this already, it could get deprioritized. I’ll be keeping my eye on their progress.
@thull
> saying finally as if they've been around for decades.
They've been around for years and had more funding than any decentralized social web startup since Diaspora. Probably more than all fediverse software put together. Putting up a beta without even finishing the federation protocol, let alone their implementation, is kind of embarrassing. Particularly because it also meant their moderation system was unfinished.
@thull
> They literally only even have employees since 2021
... or to put it another way, they finally got employees in 2021 ;)
But none of this changes the fact they've rushed into production before finishing a full working prototype. Which suggests the marketing department is in charge of the release schedule, not the engineering department :/
So whether or not they're on schedule is kind of beside the point.
@PDFlynn
AT is a documented federation protocol. Source code is available. We can evaluate on technical merits without going down rabbitholes about one of the people involved.
Even if true, unless this gives him magical powers, it has no bearing on the technical merits of the BlueSky software or the AT Protocol. One correction to my last post, apparently not all BlueSky source code is available (yet?).
Secondly, Dorsey is the major funder since Titter pulled out and he sits on the board, but he is not the CEO (@arcalinea is). I've yet to find solid evidence for who owns the company. Can you link me?
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