Mastodawn

About Bluesky and federation:
Edit: There might be some mistakes, and my information could be outdated, but the point still stands - Bluesky wasn't built on 100% federation from the start.

I've been wondering about Bluesky's decentralization again. I can't think of any reason why I'd want to self-host Bluesky in its current form. I cannot 100% self host "my own Bluesky".

Their main selling points for building their own protocol were easier migration and better discoverability, but right now there's no simple way to migrate my Bluesky account to my own instance. And hosting the centralized parts yourself isn't really possible, or if it were, not affordable, they haven't made that feasible, by design, it seems.

Even if you self-host a PDS, Bluesky's Relay only indexes up to 10 accounts from it. You can run more, but they won't federate, the central infrastructure decides what gets seen. They control this (source: https://docs.bsky.app/blog/self-host-federation#:~:text=For%20a%20smooth%20transition%20into,for%20everyone%20in%20the%20ecosystem.). You can self-host a PDS (Personal Data Server), but you still depend on Bluesky's centralized Relay and AppView. There's no production-ready alternative infrastructure from what I gather.

It feels like I'd be renting a room in a hotel that someone else is running anyway, when I want my own hotel.

If Mastodon gGmbH vanishes tomorrow, my instance keeps running and federating with everyone else. If Bluesky PBC vanishes, the ecosystem would need to scramble to stand up replacement infrastructure that doesn't really exist yet.

ATProto keeps getting evaluated on its promises while other systems get evaluated on their merits. The "portability" selling point depends on infrastructure that isn't mature enough to actually catch you if Bluesky falls.

I trust W3C, the builders and fathers of the World Wide Web, ActivityPub and the Fediverse.

#Decentralization #SelfHosting #SelfHosted #Mastodon #Fediverse #Bluesky #Servers

Early Access Federation for Self-Hosters | Bluesky

For a high-level introduction to data federation, as well as a comparison to other federated social protocols, check out the Bluesky blog.

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John Ahlroos Jan 16

@rolle Nicely put.

This is the reason I went with Mastodon in 2022 and still not regretting it.

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Ralph Brandi Jan 16

@rolle I self host my own PDS, but yeah, too much depends on their centralized services. I think Blacksky is trying to set up a completely separate but federated instance, but if even they struggle to, I don’t see any way for a lone person like me to.

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Fox Ritch

🇩🇪Jan 16

@rolle activitypub kinda sucks but compared to atproto it's the perfection the borg where searching for.

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Emil Jacobs - Collectifission Jan 16

@rolle This neatly sums up why, every time a BS fan was talking about federation, I just didn't get it. Now I understand they were only pretending to talk about federation, or perhaps worse, talk about some twisted definition of 'federation'. That's why I simply didn't understand them. They were talking about something else entirely, while claiming "federation" at the same time.

Gaslighting by design?

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Stefan Bohacek Jan 16

@rolle Well, the problem is that vast majority of people don't care about this.

*But*, one lesson from the forkiverse should be, this is still a great selling point for community organizers. And they can bring over their people.

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Ondřej Žižka Jan 21

@stefan @rolle For instance... Governments 😉 We pay them to protect democracy. So it should be a no-brainer.

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Stefan Bohacek Jan 21

@OndrejZizka You'd think so!

I've actually tried reaching out to relevant agencies in NYC and New Jersey, but there was no interest at the time.

@rolle

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Ondřej Žižka Jan 22

@stefan @rolle Rinde & repeat 🙂 That's how it works in politics. If you find some good politics. But they are busy with their own program..

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Jens Ljungkvist Jan 16

@rolle

This is why I’m on the Fediverse, bridging with BlueSky. Because I’d be happy to federate with them, if they’d open up as standard.

But they don’t. They want to keep to themselves unless someone explicitly says they want to bridge to Fediverse.

That’s the reason I don’t really trust BlueSky.

Did you see the European PDS, EuroSky?

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Mathew Storm Jan 16

@rolle

That's crazy. I wonder why they are trying so hard to look decentralized, when under the hood they really aren't.

If they truly cared about decentralization, they would have implemented the already existing ActivityPub it became a W3C recommended standard in 2018...

Something fishy about bluesky. Thanks for sharing, I didn't know about this!

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Roni Rolle Laukkarinen Jan 16

@smattymatty Their problem is they wanted their own from the begin with, to control. They claim that Fediverse and ActivityPub community have been "suspicious" towards them, but also "it’d have been a difficult collaboration if we chose to use AP, especially since we weren’t willing to compromise on some of the decisions". I see it they never even wanted to try.

https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/issues/255#issuecomment-1287953987

Already a decentralized federated protocol · Issue #255 · bluesky-social/atproto

Activitypub already exists. Why not just work on that? Why is this needed?

GitHub

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gabboman the wafrn dev Jan 16

@rolle

I have too many corrections on this one.
Pds a year ago when i got to 100 accounts I had to get in contact with someone on the team, now is higher

The relay and app view: have you seen appviewlite? Its quite light

Regarding production ready alternatives: blacksky. Seriously. Blacksky

The idea is different. Fedi is trains and bsky are trucks. Knowing about one doesn’t means you know the other. The architecture is too different.

And a lot of the times the question is “wait you dont get railed i mean use rails?”

If bsky llc vanished tomorrow it would be fine. Seriously

Its a bit late here but if you want we can keep this conversation later in a better medium than this one, this one will make both of us look like confrontational pricks

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Else, Someone Jan 17

@gabboman I for 1 would love to hear more. I understand that you can keep custody of your own key, but I still don't get it what is the vision for self hosting, bootstrap, and the "scaling down"...

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gabboman the wafrn dev Jan 17

The idea for self hosting is the pds that does data stuff. The architecture is very different to the fedi one.

Making a simple “amnesic” relay is super cheap and simple. There are a lot of simple pieces and you can make all of them without bsky.

In this moment the only centralised stuff is the did:plc and they are working ok giving that to another open entity like w3c

(Did plc: hello yes account did something here is hosted in this domain (wich can chage))

The idea isn’t scaling down to a raspberry pi but a 30€ dedicated server from ovh at minimum if you want to host THE WHOLE STACK.

The pds? Yeah a potato pc is fine and less resource intensive than any fedi server

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Else, Someone Jan 17

@gabboman

> did:plc →w3c

Can we interoperate if we end up with uhh idk w3c-us and anti-MIC w3c-eu or something?

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gabboman the wafrn dev Jan 17

Once it gets standarised

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irelephant Jan 16

https://reddwarf.app is a client that runs in your browser without a relay or appviews. All it needs is a pds.

Red Dwarf

an appview-less Bluesky client using Constellation and PDS Queries

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irelephant Jan 16

https://reddwarf.app is a client that runs in your browser without a relay or appviews. All it needs is a pds.

Red Dwarf

an appview-less Bluesky client using Constellation and PDS Queries

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hallunke23 🇺🇦

Jan 17

Well, I recently discovered that Bluesky got one step closer to decentralization:
It is now possible to set up DIDs without depending on Bluesky's services. If you look into the AT spec, you will find that there are now two types of DIDs that can be used for Bluesky: did:plc (which can only be issued by Bluesky) and did:web which essentially consist of a domain name. So an AT user of johndoe.example.com could have a DID of did:web:johndoe.example.com.

But now there are at

(1/3) @rolle #Bluesky

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hallunke23 🇺🇦

Jan 17

least 3 parts that remain to be done:
• Alternative instances need own Relay and AppView -> should be feasable
• Alternative instances need their own servers for private messages -> This is still a problem. How are you supposed to chat with someone if another instance can't find your chat server?
• Bluesky still needs to adopt IPv6 -> This is also a problem. IPv4 is slowly heading for its end, and I wouldn't want to rely on IPv4 for Bluesky federation.

Another issue that
(2/3) @rolle #Bluesky

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hallunke23 🇺🇦

Jan 17

popped up recently is that Bluesky allowed ICE (Terrorist Organization) to open an account on their platform which might be a good reason for deferating them.

With those 3 issues (ICE, IPv4 and centralized Chat), I think I wouldn't want to federate with Bluesky anymore.

Oh, and btw, my Mastodon account which is bridged to Bluesky, recently was banned by Bluesky. I have no clue why this happened because Bluesky won't tell me.

(3/3) @rolle #Bluesky

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Tommi 🤯Jan 17

@rolle What do you think, @sirodoht?

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zivi Jan 17

@rolle atproto is quite literally a scam built on gaslighting with false promises ^^^^

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Devil Doll, Esq.Jan 17

@rolle

Please let your words get to @mmasnick ’s ears. A person that I admire, and have probably been banned by, for harping this point. As a non-sycophant, I just see him addicted to the numbers game, just like I saw others fall, when Twitter fell. It’s an addiction, and it demands an intervention. Individual, intelligent human minds can break the dopamine abuse cycle, with our help.

Follower count is not the dragon you need to be chasing, friends. Bluesky is owned, and it will take you down, as low as its billionaires and advertisers can gaslight you.

Only you can make the choice to stop.

Follower count is a drug. The algorithm that makes you think your influence is measured in a number, is the dopamine rush. It is designed so that you will defend it, argue for it, and never want to let it go.

It is gross, and it is making your teeth rot, when those of us who like you, see you.

Sorry to be so dramatic, but this is the current state of things, in analogy. 🤷🏼‍♂️

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LarsNygard Jan 17

@rolle

The problem with self hosting and mastodon is that only a handful of tech people actually care to host their own. Hosting an instance starts to cost serious money if you have a lot of users.

I think the best solution would be a torrent based solution that can run entirely in a browser. I've started working on such a client, but development is stale right now for resources, time and knowledge.

I've successfully synced profiles from LAN to a mobile on cellular network, so the concept should work.

If anyone wants to take a look, fork or join, let me know:

https://github.com/larsnygard/SnartNet

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Roni Rolle Laukkarinen Jan 17

@Lach "Only a handful"? As far as I know, there are tens of thousands of instances in the Fediverse. You can host your own server on the Fediverse with a Raspberry Pi if you want, or you can start a WordPress blog anywhere and use that. Or you can start using Ghost or Writefreely without any technical knowledge. The same definitely doesn't apply to Bluesky.

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LarsNygard Jan 17

@rolle

Not everyone can host their own. Most of my friends and family can't. If you host an instance and get two thousand users, it won't be free to host. Ten thousands instances is a handful in this matter. And if you host your own instance and have a million followers?

Torrents can scale for all of this. It will also be impossible to block. No central servers to attack. No central storage of data.

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Roni Rolle Laukkarinen Jan 17

@Lach Yeah, P2P works to some extent. The Nostr blockchain concept is also quite interesting. But in my opinion, the Fediverse thrives because we share resources to a certain degree. Not every post is hosted by every instance.

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tesaguri 🦀🦝Jan 18

@rolle The 10-account-per-PDS limit on the official relay was an "early access limitation" (according to the blog post you cited), which has been lifted long ago. The current limit is 5 accounts per second per PDS: <https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/rate-limits#relay-limits>

Rate Limits | Bluesky

Rate limits help service providers keep the network secure. For example, by limiting the number of requests a user or bot can make in a given time period, it prevents bad actors from brute-forcing certain requests and helps us limit spammy behavior.

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Kristian 🌒Jan 20

@rolle I'm also still undecided about Bluesky but I completely get that point about the PDS and making portability of ones own data easy at least in theory. I mean, after all, this is still virtually impossible in the ActivityPub Fediverse (except maybe for Hubzilla). To me this is not so much an achievement of Bluesky but rather proves (to me) that the ATProto folks were serious about data portability whereas the ActivityPub crowd went with that ... rather odd choice of binding virtually everything used there to fully qualified HTTPS URIs. I mean, everyone's comparing ActivityPub to e-mail again and again, and can you imagine e-mail with your messages being tied to your particular e-mail provider and your whole local mail archive being rendered useless (as in being able to respond to messages or even being able to keep an offline archive in the first place) once you decide to move to another e-mail provider? Given how old e-mail is and given this and a lot of other issues of decentralized federated messaging have been solved quite well in these old protocols, I again and again am surprised to see ActivityPub fail here, and I dearly hope this will get fixed at some point. In this and also in some other aspects (like decoupling "server administration" from "server moderation" which is more than just sane, or using your PDS as your /only/ data store for everything you do in the Atmosphere with applications for dedicated purposes just being clients to these data - unlike the Fediverse where you quickly end up with accounts on a plethora of different systems with different stores and data spread all across), ATProto at least to me seems smarter and I'm sad not to have these things in ActivityPub ever since. Maybe it'll change some day, not sure.