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 sounds cool, but too technical for me to follow.
- Seems like it got removed…
it’s going to be a merrier once the dot world team adopts and runs it.
just like lemmy.
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.
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.
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.
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 that exist today are harmful) but does a transparent, community-managed algorithm have to be a bad thing?
What’s the point in them making a reddit alternative when they can just spin up their own Lemmy instances? That seems pointless.
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
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.
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.
