I can never find a straight answer to this - which may be the answer in and of itself - but do they plan to federate with anyone besides themselves in the future?
I believe the idea is that they’re not federating with any other existing site, they’re creating a new variety of federation with themselves as the first member, with people being able to set themselves up as additional independent nodes in that federation.
They aren’t using ActivityPub, what Mastodon and Lemmy use, they’re using their own new protocol called AT (Authenticated Transfer). So it’s less that they don’t plan on federating with anybody else, and more that there’s nobody to federate with. Maybe somebody else might pickup AT in the future, but AT is still a work in progress and there isn’t a lot of incentive for anybody to do so yet.
So Federation lets you move your data, but that’s it? It still has global moderation and from what it sounds like all accounts are still dependent on the original BlueSky server to login. So if it goes down, doesn’t that just take all servers with it?
It is more complicated than that. There are multiple different server components that make up Bluesky and its federation. The PDS (Person Data Server) is what they’re mostly talking about in that press release. You can however run all three major server components yourself and setup a completely separate network that would then federate with Bluesky proper. It’s quite different to Mastodon and other ActivityPub services (where you setup a Mastodon, Lemmy, WriteFreely, etc… instance and then federate).
Still, at present it does feel a little pointless.
This is the same criticism that was made of cryptocurrency's claim to fame regarding decentralization, consensus, and resilience to authoritarian takeover.
"If you take all these different parts of your identity, all the games you play, all the things you buy, all the groups you join, and stick them into one system, that's a central system. It doesn't matter how many servers that system spans, you've pooled all that data in one place."
And ultimately we can make the same criticism of the Fediverse itself. It's nice that there are different platforms, different instances, different communities... but it's still just one entity at the end of the day. This is especially apparent with the spam wave we just saw. Misskey, Mastodon, Lemmy, even kbin was not invulnerable. You don't need to attack them individually, you can attack them all at once, and then they will naturally spread your attack to other instances for you.
None? I don't debate that Blue Sky is corporate-owned while Bitcoin and the Fediverse aren't. Rather, I'm saying the thing they all have in common is that they like to think of themselves as "decentralized" federations of independent systems and users, but in reality they are all "centralized" systems with shared weaknesses. This is the "ideological contradiction" I thought you were referring to.
Supposing Bluesky Inc. would want to cut the cord to a particular instance it would be possible? Beside just defederating but getting it completely down?
Im confused why people are confused that they announced federation without having servers to federate with? It literally just got announced why would people expect there to already be big servers for them to federate with?
Because why would you federate using your own protocol when there’s a perfectly viable protocol (ActivityPub) that you could use instead and you could federate with the whole Fediverse from day 1.
Because they want to make a better protocol? Yeah it sucks theyre not compatible but i dont really blame them when activitypub hasn’t received updates in a very very long time. I mistrust bluesky since theyre VC funded but i also appreciate the new features theyre doing and hope it causes activitypub to improve.
This ha nothing to do with EEE. Theyre making their own thing. If we want to talk about EEE lets talk about the things Mastodon does that makes it hard for Lemmy etc to federate with them.
Im sorry this attitude of “i dont care about FOSS having better design/features than the closed stuff, if its FOSS its better” really sucks. I want Lemmy to be better than reddit snd Mastodon to be better than twitter.
EEE would be using AP, adding some extra features, and slowly making the original foss part irrelevant because your extra features are now required by 90% of the userbase.
I don’t really know what they think they can improve, but trying to improve ActivityPub is probably a more sustainable route than just starting a new protocol. Breaking changes and all that.
I also really don’t trust them - I suspect they went for their own protocol because really they just want to be the biggest server in their own semi-closed garden.
It’s for-profit right? Enshittification is just a matter of time.
As soon as they mentioned “algorithmic feeds and viral content”, not interested.
You get “viral content” because of algorithmic feeds, which are there to 1) keep you engaged on the platform, and 2) allow them to push sponsored content to you for profit.
Even the word “feed” in this kind of context just reminds me of cows at a feedlot, mindlessly munching down on whatever garbage is piped into the trough, slowly being fattened up to be sold off to the highest bidder.
There are days when I get on here and there’s not much of anything interesting in my communities and you know what? I’m fine with that. I put the phone down and do something else. I don’t need an endless torrent of “content” to surf courtesy of an algorithmic feed that doesn’t have my best interests at heart.
Your default timeline view on Bluesky is just ‘posts from the people you’ve chosen to follow, in date/time order’. That’s the algorithm.
Everything else is optional and you can choose whatever other timelines or views you also want to see. If you only want to see the posts from people you follow then you don’t need to subscribe to any other feeds / algorithms.
It’s enshittified right in the design of the protocol. The entire idea of ATproto is to decentralize the annoying (& legally tricky) stuff like identity management and moderation, while keeping the profitable stuff (advertisement embedded in algorithmic feeds) more or less centralized.
And even though they are quite open about that in their technical documentation, somehow people fail to see it for what it is and think this would be somehow to their own benefit.
That blusky didn’t use [activitypub] is so typical of these companies. It’s like the lightning cable when everyone else is using USB-C. Fuck you apple, and your shitty plug. And fuck you blusky and your reinvention of the wheel. Use the standard you egotistical F$*!4.
They were clear from the start they they were doing bsky in part because they didn’t like ActivityPub as a protocol.
I mean, I’m sure they really just wanted to control the protocol development more than anything, not liking the protocol was what they said. It was meant to be a direct competitor to Mastodon from day one.
So... "federation" without control? What's the point?
They stress that a difference between their federation and ActivityPub is that on ActivityPub "your “instance”, or server, determines your community, so your experience depends on which server you join" while for them "On Bluesky, your experience is based on what feeds and accounts you follow, and you can always participate in the global conversation (e.g. breaking news, viral posts, and algorithmic feeds)." and "Moderation on Bluesky is not tied to your server, like it is on Mastodon. Defederation, a way of addressing moderation issues in Mastodon by disconnecting servers, is not as relevant on Bluesky because there are other layers to the system."
The big difference is that I can't choose an instance that blocks/does not interact with the servers loaded with Nazis, terrorists, and/or child abusers? Why the hell is it of such paramount importance to Jack Dorsey that the rest of us are forced to interact with Nazis?
I mean, if the server is running in a host you control, you can do whatever with it, no? You can just modify the software to just not do what other servers say, no?
You’re talking about “Nazis” so much it looks like you travelled straight from 1942 to now just a few moments ago and do not yet grasp the fact that Bluesky would obviously ban them since it’s like a big monolithic Mastodon instance
? You can block the entire nazi server and you will essentially be defederates from it without relying on your servers admins to do it. This makes it easier to block nazis?
So every new user needs to block all the nazi servers themselves before they get a non-nazi feed?
The whole point of joining a server that defederates nasty stuff for you is that you delegate that responsibility to someone you trust to handle moderation for you. Just like you trust community mods or the admins of your instance on Lemmy.
Servers will likely be able to have recommended block lists and default block lists you can opt out of. Federation was literally just announced i think its fair to give it time for them to improve it. I think users having the option is better look at cases like mastodon.art that defederates from servers constantly and none of the users ever know who or why theyre defederating
Most users don’t want to care about moderation like that. Users may care to block stuff they’re not interested in like “I’m not interested in soccer so I’ll block the soccer server/community”. Most users don’t want to even think about seeing the kind of content most reasonable ActivityPub servers defederate from. There’s also often a legal risk if you don’t defederate as what constitute legal content depends on a servers location.
look at cases like mastodon.art that defederates from servers constantly and none of the users ever know who or why theyre defederating
If users don’t like servers that indiscriminately defederates from others, they are free to go to other servers. This is not a bug, this is a feature.
Idk what to tell you. If you prefer how it is on activitypub then use activitypub. I barely ever use bluesky and mainly use lemmy snd mastodon. I think having no say in who you’re defedersted from sucks. Its why lemmy lets users block a server now even though mastodon doesnt. This is good.
Lol “just leave the art server” is terrible for artists and also 90% of people have no idea what defederating is and wont ever know theyre defederated from X server. I think its way better for servers to set their default blocklists that block the server they dont like and users to be able to choose to opt out of them, add more blocklists, etc.
Its why lemmy lets users block a server now even though mastodon doesnt.
As someone who had to switch away from mastodon.art because my pool of federated instances was getting so small it felt pointless to be on a federated platform… I’m SO glad Lemmy takes this approach. I don’t mind my instance having some control over who they federate with (I have zero interest in seeing actual nazi comment or CP for example) but if my instance blocked lemmy.world or another similarly large one I’d definitely be a bit screwed (mastodon.art defederated mastodon.social for a time!)
To be fair, Bluesky does have “blocklists” maintained by other users that you can opt into, and quite a few popular ones exist with active maintainers who take and act on reports pretty quickly. So you still can delegate moderation responsibilities. One advantage to this is that you can opt into a few blocklists based on what you personally want to block - separate lists exist for hateful bigots, crypto pushers, and so on. I gave it a shot out of curiosity and haven’t run into any issues yet, but that’s just me.
I still prefer Mastodon for broader AP integration, and I think blocklists aren’t discoverable enough outside of word of mouth, but I am curious to see how that turns out for Bluesky. Certainly an improvement over Xitter imo.
But on Mastodon the user has to dig through a bunch of instances to find one that filters out what they don’t want to see, and figure out if it’s an instance worth joining for other reasons. I’d argue there’s probably more work to join Mastodon than to join Bluesky and filter your feed. But I don’t use Bluesky so I don’t know.
This is pretty standard online though - even regular Google has settings like “Safe Search:On” that you can toggle to moderate your search results.
It really just depends on what the default settings are when you arrive at a service before you start using it, and how obvious and discoverable you make those settings controls.
Can you block entire servers, though? Do you have the ability to even tell content apart based on server of origin? It's not clear that you can and the implication seems to be that the only thing you get out of hosting your own server is hosting your own data; it doesn't seem to offer you any sort of control over federation.
You can make and share custom feeds based on XYZ parameters and you can make and share block lists so I think its fair to assume you can make and share a blocklist that is “block everyone from X server”. Federation was literally just announced so i think its fair all of the features havent been completed
users can do that already on fediverse…? Additionally admins have power to block servers they wish, that gives much control and is a lot better, dont see the advantage bluesky is pretending to have.
We had a thing a while back on Lemmy where a bunch of semi-popular instances (including lemmy.world, though they seem to have rolled that back) all defederated from instances that mentioned piracy. I don’t have a problem with piracy. I want to talk about piracy.
If Lemmy ran on a system like Bluesky’s, I wouldn’t have needed to consider making a new account on another instance just because me and the admins disagree on what we want to see on Lemmy.
I get your point, I just think It’s a matter of preference, at the end of the day.
We had a thing a while back on Lemmy where a bunch of semi-popular instances (including lemmy.world, though they seem to have rolled that back) all defederated from instances that mentioned piracy. I don’t have a problem with piracy. I want to talk about piracy.
To me, that is a feature, too. The admin team made a decision, and the community engaged, the topic was discussed, and the decision was changed. To me that’s a very healthy process. The only thing I would’ve changed would be LW engaging the community before defederating, but they were understandably worried about legal implications.
Even if LW didn’t reverse this decision, you can change instances. Lemmy 0.19 makes this easier with import/export, but I would argue it should be even easier. Ultimately though this is a lemmy implementation detail, and not an activitypub problem.
Your ID, along with the canonical data associated with it, is tied to your instance. That’s how the protocol works. There’s no mechanism for decoupling all that.
Any service can implement this today, with activitypub. Being an enhancement proposal is just an attempt to standardize extensions to ActivityPub, lots of the time that services have already implemented.
Lemmy doesn’t, since it’s not part of the protocol, and in both situations you still lose your actual id.
In general, there’s technical reasons why ids and instances are associated on Lemmy / Mastodon, but not UX reasons.
99% of users just want a username, i.e. @bigCommieMouth, they don’t necessarily want their identity tied together with the server they use to interact with the network, i.e. @bigCommieMouth, and if they did really love a specific server and wanted their identity tied to it, they could always just make @bigCommieMouth_kolektiva_socia.
So? 100% of users never used the fediverse before it existed. Bluesky / ATProtocol is now offering an alternative where usernames are not tied to instances, and that sounds like a better UX.
i thought this thread was about me correcting misunderstandings about activitypub software. i have no interest in bluesky until/unless they either aferro gpl their code or implement activitypub federation. there are no merits to their network that i can see unless one or both of those come to pass.
i thought this thread was about me correcting misunderstandings about activitypub software
I don’t see a title saying “self post: let me correct you about the activitypub protocol”, I see a link to Bluesky launching federated storage.
there are no merits to their network that i can see unless one or both of those come to pass
Then don’t engage in a discussion about their identity system, just post a blanket comment saying “they suck cause they’re not open enough” and leave the thread. The rest of us are here discussing the relative merits of one protocol vs another.
Tbf from the short time I’ve been on bluesky it seems like their algorithms are very good, I have followed the people I’m interested in and seen 0 nazi posts so far
IF a platform hosts terrorism { white-supremacism, islamist supremacism, male-supremacism with its beloved domestic-violence “enforcement”, communist-party machiavellianism, fascist machiavellianism, moneyarchist machiavellianism, etc. }…
and is able to hide that from the “majority”…
THEN they’re doing good for the world, aren’t they?
Hiding one’s evils isn’t what “doing good” means.
Not enforcing evil, is what doing good means.
Humankind’ll walk, willingly, into its own slaughterhouse, for sake of the lollipops humankind’s fed by the manipulators of the world.
Not sure what you’re trying to say either, but fascist speech using lies is fascist recruitment. That is why autonomous anti-fascism is right to disrupt fascist recruitment events in universities. Because the state or moderates care more about maintaining order. So you have to disrupt the recruiting by any means.
So if your argument is that “sunlight is the best disinfectant” then no, it definitely isn’t. There is historical evidence.
Users have to maintain public blocklists to deal with poor moderation from BSky HQ. For the most part, it works, but if you get on the bad side of anyone running a list you’re basically at the mercy of them not using their lists for personal vendettas. When that does happen, all it does is dilute the usefulness of said blocklists and in turn lets the bad actors back into the mix as people unsubscribe.
I guess it’s an immature system and maybe people will create services to maintain lists with proper accountability, appeals, etc. but that’s just trying to skirt around the main issue which is that Bluesky LLC is not interested in federating the backend service.
As for their “you can’t interact with viral posts” claim, that’s only a Mastodon problem - IMO they designed their feed system really shitty for a service trying to imitate Twitter. On Lemmy, I can easily see active posts across dozens of instances without having to subscribe to them, and the communities of those instances have a right to decide who does and doesn’t federate. We’ve successfully sectioned off troublesome communities, without turning the entire network into a fragmented map of isolation.
I would like activitypub to better support instances that do nothing but host personal data without having to also technically be a full platform (ie. those tiny masto/lemmy instances for people who dont wanna make accounts on someone else’s server). But for the regular user the current AP system is way better than what BSKY offers.
That being said, I like Bluesky and its community, I just dont think it deserves to be “fediverse”.
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