Bluesky Continues Rapid Growth, Reaches Federation Milestone
Bluesky Continues Rapid Growth, Reaches Federation Milestone
Bluesky, the decentralized Twitter spin-off championed by Jack Dorsey, continues to surge in users as the team inches toward federation.
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Bluesky is not decentralized. It's promised to be decentralized but I wouldn't be surprised if they never allow open federation.
Oh no it'll federate alright.
The thing about ATProto is that unlike AP they don't seem to expect each instance to have it's own community with it's own rules and vibes. They seem to be using federation just as a way to "scale up".
If they can get any non-bluesky-the-company folk to create instances then that's just scaling they don't have to pay for and a convenient legal scapegoat for the inevitable consequences of their lax moderation. Why wouldn't they federate?
If they can get any non-bluesky-the-company folk to create instances then that's just scaling they don't have to pay for and a convenient legal scapegoat for the inevitable consequences of their lax moderation.
Yes. This exactly is their whole business model. There has been a very good article about bluesky around for some time about that fyi.
What I want to know is what kind of soulless person bereft of imagination would create a BS instance when it's essentially just free hosting for a for-profit company.
1 year from now: "Oh, now we're too big to do that. Sorry not sorry"
The old embrace extend extinguish
From what I’ve heard most of the users don’t care about federation but just want an alternative Twitter.
Which makes sense, that’s what they joined after all. “Federation is coming” Is probably destined to be a broken promise for a while unless it goes mainstream and becomes and expectation. For now it’s just hedging bets
According to their blog post a few days ago, they're looking at federation in H1 '24, and beginning the move to put governance of the AT Protocol that powers BlueSky to an established standards body like IEFT, though they predict that'll be a multi-year process.^[https://atproto.com/blog/2023-protocol-roadmap]
I hope they continue to move towards federation; the developers at least appear very interested in it even if the community doesn't, but I'm gonna be apprehensive about getting too excited until it actually happens.
They have a number of big promises with AT Protocol, including fully portable accounts that let you keep your content, even if your home-instance (what they call provider) goes down,^[https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto-website/blob/516ce223e58b3a25bfa5150e00bb28533720885a/content/specs/atp.md] but it's hard to see if this is even preferable while they're still centralized.
Thanks! Seems interesting, especially to see what federation looks like with their more centralised model.
Personally I hope it goes well. 1. Because I think the Fedi could do with competition. 2. The idea of having relatively centralised services complementing the distributed network makes a lot of sense I suspect, with similar realisations percolating around the Fedi over time, and it might be fruitful to see it succeed instead of the usual Fedi snobbiness around not being a “real” federstion.
Standards bodies is where social protocols traditionally go to die (see Jabber/XMPP).
Fully portable accounts, even fully portable communities, is something possible with Lemmy (not implemented), along with several other interesting possibilities.
How would fully portable accounts and communities be implemented do you think? My vague understanding is that users, communities and content lives at a particular URL and can’t simply change its domain.
Right now, there are several elements:
- Users — Mastodon deals with it by introducing a "Move" action that makes any followers switch from following the old user URL to a new user URL. A server export and import would be required for the user's subscribed communities, config, and profile data.
- Comments — This is where things get somewhat hairy, but possible; the new home server (instance) would need to re-publish the user's content as coming from the new user URL. Ideally there could be a similar "Move" or "Takeover" activity that an instance could broadcast for each content item, so they would get reattached to the new user URL.
- Interactions — Other user's responses, boosts, faves, etc. reference old content URLs, so instances should follow the "Move" and "Takeover" events and fix those accordingly.
- Lemmy Communities/Posts — This one's actually the easiest: communities are just a special user that boosts any message sent to the community. You can clone a community right now by simply creating a "community user" and having it boost the same messages as the "source" community. Then you can delete the original, or have it de-boost stuff, or keep both boosts, or whatever.
Extras:
- Cross-posting — A "community user" boosts a post from another (it's a pity we don't have this yet).
- Splitting a Post — Have the second community user boost a post with just some of the comment threads, while the original de-boosts them. Now there are two posts with maybe comments that maybe follow different instance rules, or fit better with different instance profiles.
- Post linking to a toot or comment — This would need some format change, but wouldn't be too difficult.
- Upgrading a comment to a post — This would require several of the previous features, but would allow moving off-topic conversations to their right place.
Bluesky already allows you to use your own domain for your handle. Currently they just use a TXT record in DNS to verify it is your domain - but adding another record to specify on which instance this is hosted shouldn't be too hard.
Yeah, they will pay lip service to nonprofit/decentralized to keep the tech people from shutting it down immediatley, but it will never (can never) be Mastodon.
It's the same thing Threads did with ActivityPub. I kinda doubt it was ever seriously discussed, just wanted the story around it to be about ActivityPub and not how it was just a boring Twitter clone.
They probably never well because it's a capitalist apologists safe space.