Federation on the protocol was opened about 3 weeks ago so its not surprising no other company is using it yet. Theres many users running their own tiny instances and also people working on a Lemmy style app for the protocol and there’s already a Clubhouse type app and a couple different mastodon style apps.
Sorry, that’s not what I meant. The AT protocol has been available since they began. So anyone could have built apps on it all this time. Federation isnt required for their protocol to be used.
I just haven’t seen any entirely working apps (made by non-Bluesky devs) using their protocol yet. And they totally ignored using or improving ActivityPub. So it comes off as their just kind of building their own thing, which is a centralized way of thinking.
They would’ve been better off building Blusesky on ActivityPub, an open protocol that’s already battle-tested and in use by a number of different apps and made my different developers. But building a whole new protocol that no apps are using has the same net effect as if a centralized company like Instagram Threads were to do it.
If you’re saying there are non-Bluesky apps using their protocol, can you link to these apps here in a reply? Totally open to being corrected.
It would be more fair to say that they approached the problems that need to be solved in federation with different priorities than ActivityPub.
People on ActivityPub based networks seem to want more independent niche communities with their own control over the community’s content.
The AT protocol makes it so that the users, themselves, are able to control their content.
Philosophically it’s an alternative to the Nostr protocol more than ActivityPub, and I don’t know that you could wedge their prioritized solutions into this protocol’s ecosystem.
While practically there are limitations to Bluesky federation (the cost of running a general purpose relay is not likely to be user supported), there is only one piece of their tech stack that currently is centralized (as far as I’m aware).
Sadly itself the ID generation and authentication portion.
And I wish we had a solution to that problem in the ActivityPub fediverse. There is no way to keep yourself if your instance is shut down, so you don’t have any control over yourself as a user.
If that problem were solved in a way that still enabled communities the way we do I would prefer it to any of the current options.
Yeah i wish they improved activitypub but maybe competition will cause activitypub to improve. As far as I understand there hasnt been updated features to the protocol since it started and bluesky has some really cool features not available on activitypub (data portability, custom feeds, layers of moderators to choose from)
Some 3rd party apps that already exist are: Graysky, Skeets for Bluesky, Sora, and SkySpaces (the clubhouse version) is still in closed beta. Im sure theres more that I dont know of and some that are still not public like the reddit/lemmy style app. There’s a lot of developers very interested in the protocol and its still extremely early in development. One of the main devs at bluesky is pfrazee who made Beakerbrowser which was a p2p browser on the Dat Protocol back in the day.
The PDS, in many ways, fulfills a simple role: it hosts your account and gives you the ability to log in, it holds the signing keys for your data, and it keeps your data online and highly available. Unlike a Mastodon instance, it does not need to function as a full-fledged social media service. We wanted to make atproto data hosting—like web hosting—into a fairly simple commoditized service. The PDS’s role has been limited in scope to achieve this goal. By limiting the scope, the role of a PDS in maintaining an open and fluid data network has become all the more powerful.
In the Bluesky app, we hardcode our in-house moderation to provide a strong foundation that upholds our community guidelines. We will continue to uphold our existing policies in the Bluesky app, even as this new architecture is made available. With the introduction of labelers, users will be able to subscribe to additional moderation services on top of the existing foundation of our in-house moderation.
You’ll see a lot more on their site. But the point is, this is more about a “distributed infrastructure” than federated control. So much still has to go through their central servers. Hosting your own server has little benefits. Moderation is still very centralized, even after their planned features for moderation.
what downsides does the PDS part have? seems like its a good thing?
Their moderation is only hardcoded in their app. You can stack other moderators on top of theirs or use a third party app to not get any of their moderation. That doesn’t seem bad especially for now to prevent spam etc from ruining the experience for users and to prevent people disabling all moderation and making a mess on their servers.
Federation is enabled now. Its also a one year old project not 6+ years like mastodon so I think its fair to cut them some slack
Not the person you replied to. But I think they meant that Bluesky is using a protocol that only the company uses.
Sure its a federated and decentralized protocol, I guess. But if they’re the only platform using it, it’s still rather centralized in that regard.
Federation on the protocol was opened about 3 weeks ago so its not surprising no other company is using it yet. Theres many users running their own tiny instances and also people working on a Lemmy style app for the protocol and there’s already a Clubhouse type app and a couple different mastodon style apps.
Could you link to the Lemmy style app please, I haven’t heard of this before
Its still in closed alpha the developer is in the bluesky pds discord
Sorry, that’s not what I meant. The AT protocol has been available since they began. So anyone could have built apps on it all this time. Federation isnt required for their protocol to be used.
I just haven’t seen any entirely working apps (made by non-Bluesky devs) using their protocol yet. And they totally ignored using or improving ActivityPub. So it comes off as their just kind of building their own thing, which is a centralized way of thinking.
They would’ve been better off building Blusesky on ActivityPub, an open protocol that’s already battle-tested and in use by a number of different apps and made my different developers. But building a whole new protocol that no apps are using has the same net effect as if a centralized company like Instagram Threads were to do it.
If you’re saying there are non-Bluesky apps using their protocol, can you link to these apps here in a reply? Totally open to being corrected.
It would be more fair to say that they approached the problems that need to be solved in federation with different priorities than ActivityPub.
People on ActivityPub based networks seem to want more independent niche communities with their own control over the community’s content.
The AT protocol makes it so that the users, themselves, are able to control their content.
Philosophically it’s an alternative to the Nostr protocol more than ActivityPub, and I don’t know that you could wedge their prioritized solutions into this protocol’s ecosystem.
While practically there are limitations to Bluesky federation (the cost of running a general purpose relay is not likely to be user supported), there is only one piece of their tech stack that currently is centralized (as far as I’m aware).
Sadly itself the ID generation and authentication portion.
And I wish we had a solution to that problem in the ActivityPub fediverse. There is no way to keep yourself if your instance is shut down, so you don’t have any control over yourself as a user.
If that problem were solved in a way that still enabled communities the way we do I would prefer it to any of the current options.
Yeah i wish they improved activitypub but maybe competition will cause activitypub to improve. As far as I understand there hasnt been updated features to the protocol since it started and bluesky has some really cool features not available on activitypub (data portability, custom feeds, layers of moderators to choose from)
Some 3rd party apps that already exist are: Graysky, Skeets for Bluesky, Sora, and SkySpaces (the clubhouse version) is still in closed beta. Im sure theres more that I dont know of and some that are still not public like the reddit/lemmy style app. There’s a lot of developers very interested in the protocol and its still extremely early in development. One of the main devs at bluesky is pfrazee who made Beakerbrowser which was a p2p browser on the Dat Protocol back in the day.
They’ve already made it clear what they mean by federation, and it has none of the benefits of real federation like in lemmy or mastodon.
What have they made clear?
https://docs.bsky.app/blog/self-host-federation
And:
https://docs.bsky.app/blog/blueskys-moderation-architecture
You’ll see a lot more on their site. But the point is, this is more about a “distributed infrastructure” than federated control. So much still has to go through their central servers. Hosting your own server has little benefits. Moderation is still very centralized, even after their planned features for moderation.
what downsides does the PDS part have? seems like its a good thing?
Their moderation is only hardcoded in their app. You can stack other moderators on top of theirs or use a third party app to not get any of their moderation. That doesn’t seem bad especially for now to prevent spam etc from ruining the experience for users and to prevent people disabling all moderation and making a mess on their servers.