Been getting this sense lately that the fediverse may be thinning out a bit, and in parallel getting a sense people I know are finally jumping to "bluesky" in numbers.
Trying to figure out exactly at what point I decide I'm willing to create a feed over there. My position has been "I'll post there when I don't have to use their servers to do it", but I continue to suspect this will literally never happen because their protocol is designed to look like federation without being ever federatable
@mcc the amount of ppl i’ve seen talking about making a bluesky account while really not wanting to actually use bluesky makes me feel like some sort of metaphor for broader capitalism but i’m not sure i can exactly suss it out
@emaytch it's so frustrating that they appear to have gone out of their way to make a federation protocol intentionally designed to be incompatible with other federation protocols, or else I could just use bsky without having to actually use bsky
@mcc i sincerely cannot believe that any modern company backed with VC money would ever choose an open protocol instead of one that lets them lock in customers.
@mcc eventually I’ll finish tracking down where else online I can find the accounts I still follow on Twitter because they haven’t moved anywhere else I already have an account, and if enough of them are on bluesky maybe I’ll make an account there too
@mcc I do think it's thinning a bit, but I don't necessarily think it's Bsky at least. It's kinda felt like this to me since late last year, so I figure it's just er. Normal platform exhaustion? Guessing some went to Threads, most just stopped using social media and went to Tok.
I'm on Bsky too, it's fine, but also it wouldn't surprise me if it died. Opening up like this feels more like a VC hail Mary.
@glassbottommeg Funny thing is the decentralization was originally (eliding a derailing train of thought here about Jack Dorsey being inherently untrustworthy) the point of bsky, but then they started getting actual users and as far as I can tell the userbase they've developed wants something very specific out of the site and it's not compatible with decentralization. Notice the fact of actual alarm when open web access to bsky posts was added, which bodes poorly for ATproto's firehose opening
@mcc that's one of my two stipulations, the other is "if i block a bunch of creeps from there, are they actually blocked or is the protocol itself / their implementation of it structurally incapable of doing that and they'll be able to harass me (and any of the vulnerable people i might have boosted or replied to, etc) with impunity and all blocking did was make it so that i individually didn't see it"
@mcc oh for sure, the privacy angle is more just "can assholes see my posts" which isn't worth depending on, but the safety angle is "can assholes engage with / reply to my posts / can everyone see those replies" - i can't tell yet what bsky's answers to those are
@mcc I think their blog post said they'll support federation later this month. My understanding though is Bluesky PDS (Personal Data Server) stores your own data but federation still relies on centralised bluesky-run servers. Kind of defeating the point :/
Based on my (admittedly based on reading summaries of the whitepapers and not the whitepapers) understanding of the proposed bsky protocol, I think if I want to post in a way bsky users can see without using the services of BlueSky LLC the best I'll ever be able to do is post a write-only feed on my website which BlueSky LLC then crawls. But I wonder if I'll be able to opt into this kind of parasitic federation without agreeing to a TOS that gives BlueSky LLC rights to train an LLM on me
@The4thCircle I'm certain, but I didn't grant them rights to do that, so maybe they lose the rights to use their model if a future national court decision declares "derivative works are derivative works even if a corporation really really doesn't want them to be"
Imagine an alternate network shape for ATProto where instead of BlueSky's "Big Aggregator" relay, users associate their identifies with specific "home" relays, and relays only fetch posts from relays their "home" users follow "home" users on. This could enable non-algorithmic moderation by treating relay membership as "trust" and severing relays who don't internally moderate. Hey wait, we just reinvented ActivityPub without domain names!
You know what I want? ActivityPub without domain names :(
I regret that this mini-thread did not give me an opportunity to engage in my running joke of intentionally misinterpreting the abbreviation "bsky" to mean "Bullshit, Kentucky"
I'm still pretty confused what a "PDS" is. Like exactly what the scope of its responsibilities are. Bluesky's page for the PDS server https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds explains poorly either what the software does or even what dependencies it has.
I guess I gotta go read a 18-month-old architecture document & hope it still describes reality.
It uses the filesystem hierarchy as its database, which is relatively simple (but ugh, very inefficient). I've been meaning to rewrite its data layer to use LMDB instead.
No, you don't need huge infrastructure for this; not if you have well written code.
@mcc a lot of people I know are asking these questions!
Once upon a time (mid-2008? Oh, I was so naive) I tried to build an "apache/cgi-bin for building cross-protocol decentralized social tools." At the time that was xmpp, pubsubhubbub, RSS, and indieweb-i-guess. I maintain that it's still possible with the modern set of photos, and probably easier than one would reckon (and probably harder, too). I'm not sure what the modern metaphor would be (so many options!)
@mcc the other historical story here that I can offer is that the xmpp pubsub spec (xep-60) was around 350 printed pages. I sat down with Peter Saint Andre and @hildjj at OSCON in 2007 and we wrote out a minimal profile of the spec in Notepad.exe that was two printed pages including example XML stanzas. That "tiny spec[k]" formed the basis of the functional pubsub Interop that @ralphm and I implemented between Twitter and Jaiku, basically over one evening at Social Web FooCamp.
@mcc Interfacing with the Fediverse could be very simple if all you wanted was to fetch content from it : each user has a outbox, which is a URL containing a json list of their posts, you can parse that, like a RSS feed. This is where the simplicity stops. :)
I you want to participate, ie post messages, you need: 1/ something that will post to other people inboxes to send them messages (all people you want to see your message, and you probably want to find the shared inbox of the servers to post only one message for all those that are on the same server), 2/ at the very least static files implementing WebFinger and your profile json page, servers will fetch that, 3/ signing your message with HTTP signature when sending them, that's a non trivial part
If you want to be fully integrated, that is, receive replies, subscribe to account and be notified of new posts, allow people to subscribe to you, etc, you need some inbox software. How you store things is up to you, though.
@mcc Note that while there is this outbox document with all posts from an user in it, which could theoretically be all that is needed to publish, this is not how clients are implemented (and not either how the standard recommends them to be implemented) : ActivityPub is not a pull protocol, it's a push one. So if you just expose a static outbox page, nobody will see your new posts. You have to push them to people inboxes.
If I wind up making a Bluesky PDS what this will most likely look like is some relatively (God, I hope) small block of code that connects to mastodon.social once an hour, reads my Mastodon feed like a regular client, and then republishes it into whatever format PDSes publish timelines in. And then I guess my profile just says "I cannot read your replies, join some actually federated network if you want to talk to me"
@mcc If you feel that way, why not just wait and see if the BSky - ActivityPub bridge happens?
My main interest in BSky is the people that are there and TBH, I’m fine with popping over there and reading wassup and then coming back here and posting my foolishness.
I’m glad they federated, but my understanding is that it’s all still centralized through their stuff unless you dedicate a lot more resources, which…nah, I just want a nice place to ramble. 😂
@Wraithe I prefer to have control. However I also prefer not to do work, so maybe the bridge will get going to an acceptable degree before I get this working.
The problem is this seems like Work, and I could be doing something else with my spare time that is fun and interesting instead of doing labor to grow out the network of a "public benefit corporation" (?) that appears to be trying to put an enclosure around a previously public resource
@whitequark My understanding is that "public benefit corporation" is a meaningless statement without knowing in what state it is incorporated because the definition varies from state to state. It is not even clear to me if in all states there is a difference between a "public benefit corporation" and a "benefit corporation". I do not trust anything I think I know on this subject.
@mcc Funny thing is, this was ALMOST that Futurama episode with the Slurm.
The biggest difference was that everyone rejected Slurm when they found out it was the secretions of a giant alien worm thingy. Real life is never that easy.
It also wasn't free, but ultimately neither is Bluesky. They just don't charge money is all.
I'm really stuck on this conspiracy theory I've got that Bluesky was designed from-word-Go to do something particular that furthered Twitter's goals. But now Twitter doesn't exist, and the sorta-Twitter thing that does exist doesn't have the same goals as the Twitter execs who spun off Bluesky. So the robot just keeps marching on and I do not know if the robot has enough self-awareness to interrogate its own goals
@mcc i just think its founding ambition was "twitter but nobody can yell at jack for it being/becoming a freezepeach shithole, also maybe a launching pad for a dozen different vague blockchain/dao/token bullshit ambitions", no conspiracy needed just leadership with some defective ideas building a thing and keeping their options open to steer it in a direction most people would/will hate. (implicitly, the counter-assurances i'd need to bother with it)
@mcc We're proud to announce the creation of the Torment Nexus Foundation, a non-profit organization that will ensure that the Torment Nexus remains available for humanity for the forseeable future.
@thisismissem it was controversial because the bridgers were bridging the accounts of people who didn't ask if they wanted to be bridged. i already have my own permission. i don't even have to ask
@tomw So hm thinking about it there's two possibilities here. Either they say yes because more content in the network is in their favor even if I personally don't really like them, and that benefits me because I get post hosting/visibility. Or they say no because of my "bluesky sucks" sentiments, and then I come back on the Fediverse and say the Bluesky federators wouldn't let me on their network because they're nasty censoring censorors, and that benefits me because it makes Bluesky look bad.
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