This is the first time I’m seeing a way to host a full Bluesky network, I think. It seems like a big step towards full federation beyond appviews and personal data servers.
this seems like a way to setup another centralized install. it still doesnt allow for federation between installations.
I asked the devs about this and they said that bluesky is designed to be a) modular b) trustless as much as possible. federation is supposed to happen on the trustless hosting and relay layers - you can ask your posts to be crawled by any indexer/appview.
But once you get to the indexing/querying layer, there are no more merkle proofs to keep everyone honest, so there is no point in federating because any indexer can modify/censor the content they send to another indexer instance. So you could still build an api to interact laterally between servers, but it wouldn’t be atproto anymore.
Could you maybe explain that in dumb people words in case some dumb people read your explanation and didn’t understand it? 👉👈
the short is, bluesky is only designed to ‘federate’ with itself and will never be truely decentralized as it will never interact with ‘foreign’ servers.
all they really built is a twitter where a user can control their own node of information (pds) but it will never interact with another bluesky instance.
in the real fediverse, servers interact as they come on-line and are subscribed to each other by users. this causes some security issues, and portability issues but at least its actual federation creating webs of content by fully independent peeps.
Thank you very much.
The entire point is that your pds can interact with multiple “instances” of bluesky or whatever other apps people build on the protocol.
For example there is a reddit/hn clone that people can post on (keeping their same identity) when the official bluesky service goes down. The reddit clone is fully independent from the twitter clone, but they use the same protocol and (unlike AP) the same hosting and authentication infrastructure.
Whereas on Lemmy and mastodon, my accounts are totally separate. And unlike AP, your data lives on your own pds and is never hostage to the owner of the instance that actually runs the load bearing interactivity. If they become compromised or shut down you can switch to another. No cooperation from the old owner required (unlike activitypub).
Yeah but unlike activity pub, atproto/bluesky demands each self hosted relay process a massive amount of data to participate, it is incredibly impractical and costly to envision scaling up, bluesky’s self hosting is essentially made to be a curiousity rich developers with access to powerful hardware try out as a hobbiest project and write a blog post about, not a serious general use case for everyone.
The idea of course is make it so nerds can technically do it, but the bulk of users can’t and won’t.
The strategy is convince the nerds you are giving them access to the future and that average people aren’t ready for it, and than never actually provide that future since nerds stop advocating for it because a corporation handed them a tiny scrap and that was enough to write a good techy diy blog post about.
Bluesky is the past desperately trying to convince you it is the future, don’t fall for it.
Yes, and I’ve been yelling at them about the problem of scaling down for a while, since the same “relay” service needs to be both a firehose and a full mirror. This requirement (and thus scalability) of running a relay is becoming a big problem even for the main devs. According to them however you can mitigate this to a reasonable amount for a home lab (~8 cores, 16gb ram, ~2Tb ssdl) if you simply don’t store any backlog and just retransmit posts https://bsky.app/profile/why.bsky.team/post/3lbjdux6ubc2f
This is what they’re doing internally to manage the load and are also working on implementing relay sharding/scoping to let you just index a small slice of the network, which should eliminate the problem. https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/discussions/3036 and here’s someone implementing a proof of concept third party version https://bsky.app/profile/pet.bun.how/post/3lbwnx2rxxs2o
It’s true that the main devs’ priorities are building the large scale parts first and then worrying about downscaling, the whole point was always to replace twitter and work at a similar scale, which requires hard tradeoffs. I do worry that they’ll run out of money before they can do the work to let the ecosystem become sustainable by itself.
But I have faith (for now) because they have people I know from when they worked on secure-ssb and dat protcols, which are truly decentralized but never took off for other reasons.
“But I have faith (for now) because they have people I know from when they worked on secure-ssb and dat protcols, which are truly decentralized but never took off for other reasons.”
The modern corporation is precisely defined as a structure of ownership perpendicular to ethics, one of the prime reasons for this is to progressively nullify this specific category of “there are good people in the room” defenses against extreme unsustainable extraction of profit at catastrophic consequences for everybody but shareholders.
in other words, if bluesky goes titsup you can take your pds, and set it to another relay. but then when the original bluesky comes back up you are dark on that instance. thats not decentralization. thats islands of twitter that you can switch between.
you will not be able to interact with multiple bluesky instances simultaneously.
Thats the opposite of what I said. You can use the same data with multiple services at the same time, in fact this is already possible. The whole thing would be kinda pointless otherwise.
- Seems like it got removed…
works on my end
Oh weird. When I click the link from my client it goes to a 404, but if I copy/paste the url into my browser it works
This sounds cool, but too technical for me to follow.
There is already a fediverse twitalike called mastodon. I don’t understand why anyone here cares about bluesky.
Because mastodon is the Linux of social media. One day it will be ready for the average user…
2025 is the year of
Linux DesktopMastodon
Because it doesn’t have search (at least my instance doesn’t), doesn’t show engagement so the whole thing feels empty like people are posting into the void
If the problem is fixable technical shortcomings, why not fix them instead of throwing up our hands and surrendering?
Not showing engagement is a choice, they don’t want people to interact with the most popular things
But everyone just wants Twitter, not someone’s ideas of what social media should be
As a Linux user since 2007 I feel a little dirty uttering this phrase, but:
Because not everyone is a developer.
You don’t have to be a developer to use Lemmy, yet it has similar features to reddit including search. Maybe there are sociological issues in growing its userbase, but not serious technical ones, as Usenet showed 40 years ago.
It sounds like mastodon still has technical issues . If Lemmy’s were solvable, mastodon’s are too. Otherwise, how did mastodon get built in the first place?
Just clarifying because I feel we’re talking past each other:
You asked the folks in this discussion:
If the problem is fixable technical shortcomings, why not fix them instead of throwing up our hands and surrendering?
to which I said
Because not everyone is a developer.
to which you said
You don’t have to be a developer to use Lemmy
True. But that’s not what where we’re at in the discussion.
It sounds like mastodon still has technical issues . If Lemmy’s were solvable, mastodon’s are too. Otherwise, how did mastodon get built in the first place?
I’m quite sure they are solvable, but likely not by the folks complaining about the technical issues and choosing to use other services like bluesky. Because not everyone is a developer.
So in other words, I think your musing out loud about why don’t we solve the issues instead of giving up and using something else is being directed to the wrong people.
Because it has the users Mastodon lacks.
By that logic we should also connect up with facebook and 4chan, not to mention twitter itself. bsky is just another one of those platforms from what I can tell. It is fairly new so not yet blatantly evil, but give it time. We here are supposed to know better.
bluesky is foss and open to federation, why not bluesky? Also a mastodon bluesky bridge is possible because of this as well
It’s not about the code, it’s about control of the servers and feeds. Decentralization doesn’t just mean multiple servers. It means no single entity has special authority over the user community. That isn’t the case with bluesky from what I can tell.
You are correct, if you take a step back and consider bluesky wholistically, it is DEFINITELY not decentralized.
Investors offer money, federation goes bye-bye and you end up with another twitter.
By that logic we should be happy gazing at our own navels, shouting to the void, looking at empty pages.
That’s how I see nostr
Navels, but federated!
Because the protocol allows to decentralize each part, unlike fediverse
Is there any non-Bluesky server people can register to?
it’s going to be a merrier once the dot world team adopts and runs it.
just like lemmy.
Why do the work for a for profit corp instead of just making a Mastodon server? I also wish we had a different term for these for-profit leeches that want to vacuum up free fediverse content for profit. I may be in the minority, but they are not Fediverse in my eyes. And we should not be working on ways to incorporate them, but on ways to block them off completely, and quarantine them to their own little islands in cyberspace.
Seems like a lot of people prefer bluesky for whatever reason. I wouldn’t know since I’ve no interest in either.
Marketing. Bsky got the venture dollars. That’s all.
I think it’s just discoverability of content, and probably some UX. Mastodon isn’t really a great show of what ActivityPub can do. They intentionally don’t have an “algorithm” or any kind of content discoverability. Also the federation is limited to following users, on Lemmy you can follow topics and that causes all their posts and comments to federate.
Just today I heard Bluesky is making a Reddit alternative. I’m a bit worried they overtake Lemmy.
It’s not BlueSky making the Reddit alternative, it’s third party devs. There are a few alternative apps being built on BlueSky architecture and ATProto right now.
And yea, it definitely could overtake and harm lemmy, if there are people here into the BlueSky approach (which likely suits Reddit-like apps, I think I’ve seen some say BlueSky has a Reddit flavour to it).
Honestly, given the dominance Mastodon has in AP and the shitty interop it has with lemmy, migrating to ATProto wouldn’t be the most insane idea for Lemmy IMO. Relying on BlurSky’s relay wouldn’t be for everyone. But some sort of multi-relay set up seems plausible and might be cool to see.
Drag agrees. Drag has fiddled with Lemmy’s API, and there’s so much redundant and unnecessary information on every post. No wonder it’s such a resource hog. If that redundancy is part of ActivityPub, then drag would be happy to dumb AP for a lighter protocol.
Yeah discoverability is a huge issue. I feel like tech people often get stuck on the fact that most regular people don’t want to do a ton of work to browse the web, they just want content to come to them. I know people in the fediverse have negative feelings about algorithms (and most the exist are harmful) but does a transparent, community-managed algorithm have to be a bad thing?
Yea the Mastodon devs are seriously underestimating how lazy the average person is lol
I feel like tech people often get stuck on the fact that most regular people don’t want to do a ton of work to browse the web, they just want content to come to them.
I think this is also true for why people gravitate towards places like Bluesky in more general terms as well. Without even getting into the details of whether or not a platform has an algorithm or whatever other features, whether or not a platform is federated means nothing to the average person and the benefits of the decentralized servers are a disadvantage to onboarding people. When the Reddit exodus happened, I was describing Lemmy to a friend, and when I told him that anybody could spin up their own instance, his response was “why the hell would anybody want to do that.” And this is a guy who ran his own TeamSpeak server for like 20 years.
People don’t want an alternative to Twitter - they want Twitter without the rightwing extremism. Bluesky offers exactly this with an easy and straightforward onboarding process and a familiar UI. There’s even browser extensions to search the people you follow on Twitter and find their Bluesky handles to make the swap easier.
I’ve also seen people praising Bluesky’s algorithm being entirely optional as well as a plus for discoverability. People really like the chronological timeline that doesn’t bury posts - especially artists. I haven’t used Mastodon, and I only used Twitter because all the artists jumped ship after Tumblr banned the porn, but I can say that I have enjoyed how Bluesky works similar to Tumblr in that regard. I’ve never liked algorithmic based feeds, so a chronological feed of the people I follow and the stuff they reblog from other people who I can then go check out as well is exactly the kind of experience I want out of a platform.
tech people hate algorithms
Language is so silly sometimes
Bluesky is not making a reddit alternative, a third party developer is using their hosting/auth infrastructure.
https://bsky.app/profile/frontpage.fyi https://github.com/likeandscribe/frontpage
I think it’s just discoverability of content, and probably some UX. Mastodon isn’t really a great show of what ActivityPub can do.
I’m kind of surprised I don’t see Calckey or similar mentioned more. Personally I think it has solved a lot of Mastodon’s problems, but it seems niche even within the niche that is the fediverse.
Unfortunately I feel like people have stopped looking for a Twitter alternative already
It should surprise no one that bluesky is able to leverage the socioeconomic status and wealth of its investors and founders to easily outpace the fediverse… which is a patchwork community construction maintained and developed on several orders of magnitude less capital…
so what?
The fediverse isn’t of the same “type” as a for-profit corporate social network, it doesn’t need to grow virally and produce ever growing profits to maintain legitimacy in the eyes of the people who maintain and provide foundation for the fediverse.
What’s the point in them making a reddit alternative when they can just spin up their own Lemmy instances? That seems pointless.
24 millions users
You could say the same thing about why they made Bluesky when Mastodon exists
People here need to realize that 90% of the microbloggers don’t give a fuck about decentralization or FOSS. They want something that works and doesn’t force them into a ketamine fuled nazi oligarchy delirium. Mastodon doesn’t work for normal people. It kind of works if you’re a FOSS nerd or some kind of fediverse idealist. (It works for me, because it doesn’t drag me into endless flame wars and I’m almost only following FOSS accounts).
My experience with Lemmy is that it is much more functional as in “Reddit replacement”. There are of course super few users, but it feels active and engaging (for better or worse). So in theory, maybe it could be a replacement.
But Mastodon has never been a “Twitter replacement”. It feels more like a fancy RSS client. Search, feeds and interactions just doesn’t work very well.
There are several reasons why Mastodon doesn’t work for normal people, but the biggest one is, honestly, Mastodon users. People have shown themselves to be rather inventive in the face of technical limitations, or they’re willing to put up with toxic people for the sake of a great user experience, but you need the people who show up in the space to not experience both negatives.
A lot of Mastodon’s UX is really frustrating, in large part because Mastodon tries to disguise the fact that everyone’s using different websites. People would be a lot more forgiving of the jankiness of federation if they truly understood that what they’re doing is the equivalent of talking to Facebook users from Twitter. But the UI of Mastodon, the language of Mastodon, the layout of Mastodon, the features of Mastodon, and even the ‘marketing’ of Mastodon all try to make it look like the @website.com at the end of everyone’s name is just some frilly flair.
Lemmy has some similar issues, frankly, though not nearly as bad. And Lemmy is a space where I think we will see the idea of talking to people across different websites will really be treated as more core to the culture of the space, because Lemmy isn’t really going out of its way to hide the nature of the space as much as Mastodon is.
Still, I wish the hosting websites were treated as first-class citizens by Lemmy itself, rather than as just the url the ‘communities’ are taking up space on.
I’ve heard from numerous people here that Mastodon is the “worst” of microblogging platforms on the Fediverse. Mainly due to its lack of features.
There are two kinds of people who claim that Mastodon is the best.
One, absolute fanbois and fangurls who, in addition, don’t even know that Pleroma, Misskey or any forks of either exist, much less what they’re like. Their point is always “biggest = most popular = best”, although they themselves, like almost everyone on Mastodon, were railroaded onto Mastodon without being told that there’s more to the Fediverse than Mastodon, even in terms of microblogging.
I’m not even kidding when I say the UX on the *keys is closer to Twitter than that on Mastodon. And at the same tiime, the *keys show what Fediverse projects something comes from whereas Mastodon tries hard to make everyone believe that the Fediverse is Mastodon.
Two, Mastodon devs. I’ve actually had a Mastodon developer who knew that I’m on Hubzilla comment into my face that Mastodon is literally the only feature-complete Fediverse project. I could have inquired him about Mastodon support for one or two dozen Hubzilla features, ranging from full HTML rendering over nomadic identity and WebDAV/CalDAV/CardDAV connectivity to a built-in wiki engine. But I didn’t.
Yeah, it pretty much sucks for mainstream microblogging. Good as RSS replacement though.
