Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦Apr 28, 2023

BlueSky is cosplaying #decentralization
https://rys.io/en/167.html

> Almost exactly six months after #Twitter got taken over by a petulant edge lord, people seem to be done with grieving the communities this disrupted and connections they lost, and are ready, eager even, to jump head-first into another toxic relationship. This time with BlueSky.

tl;dr:
- #BlueSky seems designed to get secondarily centralized in the "reach" layer (as they call it)
- moderation is an afterthought
- Jack Dorsey

🧵/1

BlueSky is cosplaying decentralization

Almost exactly six months after Twitter got taken over by a petulant edge lord, people seem to be done with grieving the communities this disrupted and connections they lost, and are ready, eager even

Songs on the Security of Networks
Show threadElijahApr 29, 2023

@rysiek so I made a mastodon account to post this, idk if you mentioned this, but bluesky is not federated.

I set up a bluesky "pds" and tested it in the bluesky app. you can't interact with any other pds, like bluesky.social. actors (users) are not replicated into the pds in some way, nor does the jwt token for viewing profiles transfer

here's me trying to load Henry Pickavet's did profile on bluesky from another instance

Show threadMichał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦Apr 29, 2023

@evalprime oh this is super-interesting.

So you created a fresh new PDS and you cannot federate with the main bluesky.social PDS?

Huh, first of all, thank you for testing it out and reporting in! Secondly, can you go into a bit more detail why the JWT does not work for viewing bluesky.social profiles? 

Show threadElijahApr 29, 2023

@rysiek yeah, so when you authenticate with pds, it uses jwt (you can see that here in this todo https://atproto.com/specs/atp#authentication). you can't use that token to view another user's profile, which ig is fine but the profile doesn't replicate. there's just no way to get an actor (user) in bluesky.

mastodon has an endpoint, /api/v1/accounts/lookup, that gets an Account from a webfinger address (like @evalprime). that doesn't exist in bluesky from what I can see. that endpoint runs on the instance itself

ATP | AT Protocol

Show threadElijahApr 29, 2023
you can test my instance at bsky.elijahs.space and put that into the bluesky app as a custom domain or staging.bsky.app. if you try to access another profile from a user identifier like mirandahalpern.bsky.social it just doesn't work
Show threadElijahApr 29, 2023

what it seems like is that because bsky.social is supposed to be private accessing actors from there is impossible, but accessing any pds' profiles needs a jwt token that is exclusive to that instance by default. so basically it's impossible to replicate an actor into your own pds' db anyway.

all of this is kind of fine but they claim it's federated when it's not.

Show threadElijahApr 29, 2023

I patched my pds to not require a jwt token to view profiles but even with that, there's just no way for a pds to get another pds actor's info right now.

also interesting: the frontend will not even use the app.bsky.actor.getProfile endpoint unless you're logged in. meaning that https://staging.bsky.app/profile/elijah.bsky.elijahs.space will still require you to log in/sign up

Bluesky

Show threadElijah
tl;dr: bluesky pds (instances) cannot communicate with each other because there is no endpoint (url) for actors (users) from other pds to have their profiles displayed on another pds. even though the atproto is technically a standard, it's not federated
Apr 29, 2023 at 8:46pmWeb
Show threadElijahApr 29, 2023
going to shut down this pds as I just needed it for testing. if you want to set up your own, you're going to need a postgresql db and the repos at https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto and https://github.com/bluesky-social/did-method-plc. you need to build and run the packages/pds folder in the atproto repo and the packages/server folder in the did-method-plc, copying example.dev.env to .env. then use an nginx reverse proxy to port 2583.
Comparing main...msi/pds-otel · bluesky-social/atproto

Social networking technology created by Bluesky. Contribute to bluesky-social/atproto development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub
Show threadElijahApr 29, 2023
at some point in the future I would like to create a "better bluesky" but that's literally just mastodon 💀 it's futile to put work into something that's already been done. the concept is fine but until bsky.social gets federation I won't touch it. it prob will, it's prob just because it's invite only rn.