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Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

• UseofWeapons1 3y ago
  This looks pretty compelling! The best of controlling your own data and a global, network-effects-compatible content approach. Seems like a win for users if it gets adopted.
• secondcoming 3y ago
  Just registered on Bluesky, deliberately didn't choose News or Politics as an interest, and the first post on my feed is about Donald Trump. There is no escape...
• DerSaidin 3y ago
  How does this handle spam? IIUC the main defense is choice over your own feed + moderators on the feed you choose. Is this why DMs are not supported? Because there wouldn't be a good spam protection mechanism?
  • notthemessiah 3y ago
    I wish I knew more about how one would stop instances full of malicious spam bots from flooding the services, but as for DMs, my understanding is the fact that everything is public through the AT protocol is probably why it doesn't yet have DMs (though maybe through public key crypto, one could have something). Maybe in the future, BlueSky will allow for messaging by tying accounts to some messaging protocol or services. Apparently, DMs are low priority: https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app/issues/1114 https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app/issues/1114
• fsflover 3y ago
  Without JavaScript there is no text but only the footer. Quite weird.
• nickthegreek 3y ago
  Personal Data Server (PDS) github link: https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds
• bayindirh 3y ago
  Does that mean after Bluesky reaches critical mass, it'll turn the federation off, like Google Chat killing its XMPP federation? For clarity: I'd love to see this comment and say "I was wrong" 5 or 10 years later.
  • jakebsky 3y ago
    The network is designed to be "locked open" in a way that prevents this. The architecture is designed to work like the web.
    • yupyup54133 3y ago
      Nothing against Bluesky, but I think we are all a little jaded after seeing decades of the "embrace, extend, extinguish" pattern.
      • lolinder 3y ago
        This would be more "create, extinguish", because there's no existing AT protocol network to embrace.
        • hardcopy 3y ago
          "embrace" would be the rise of decentralized social media
          • lolinder 3y ago
            If there can exist an "extinguish" step for the concept of decentralized social media itself then decentralized social media has already failed. The whole point is supposed to be about changing hearts and minds to embrace self-governance, a rug pull should just result in people moving somewhere else.
            • secstate 3y ago
              But that's sort of why Bluesky is not really decentralized, just federated. It's a pretty significant difference. Mastodon is federated and decentralized. Twitter is non-federated and centralized. Bluesky is trying to be the federated, centralized option. Whether that works, we'll see. I for one just gave up social media about 8 years ago and, while feeling like I'm missing something flares up from time to time, it's nothing like the disaster my online life was before I gave it up. It wasn't a problem of missing federation or not being centralized. It was inherent to the way social media functions against my person.
• mm263 3y ago
  I think they nailed every Mastodon criticism that I've heard floating around and addressed it, however I'm especially curious to learn about the moderation layer in-depth.
  • unshavedyak 3y ago
    I'm kind of tired of social networks in general, but this is attractive to me just because of that. I like Mastodon, but the underlying ActivityPub protocol was rather underwhelming.
    • sangnoir 3y ago
      Is the AT protocol is superior in your opinion?
      • unshavedyak 3y ago
        I don't know enough about it to give feedback. However Martin Kleppmann's[1] involvement is a huge selling point to me. It's also, seemingly, good enough that they're building very useful things on top of it like PDS, migrating users, etc. ActivityPub (AP) felt a bit like "good enough to get something done", which is amazing on one hand - people can do a lot with it. But it also means some harder problems are totally ignored[2], so the landscape between instances felt rocky to me. I also heavily disliked how federation worked in AP, ie how the protocol felt like it favored centralized instances because small instances were less likely to be pinged, were lower priority, in general was very spammy, etc. Not that the AP proto did anything to cause that.. it just didn't do anything to address it in my view, it was just data. Does AT fix my concerns over AP? No idea. But i appreciate a proto that had a bit more time in the oven and being used to (maybe) solve the harder problems that i experienced with AP. [1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03239 https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03239 [2]: These are only my opinions from a very brief stint in trying to write an AP client to federate with Mastodon, Lemmy and Kbin. I did not dive deep into AP, so please don't judge it from my experience.
        • pwdisswordfishc 3y ago
• jakebsky 3y ago
  Hey HN, the engineering team at Bluesky is especially excited to get to this point! We're happy to help answer questions and help anyone trying to run their own PDS host. Things should work pretty well for self-hosters right now, but we're standing by to help if there are any problems. Technical details and the installer are in the GitHub repo https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds And we're on Discord available to help: https://discord.com/invite/UWS6FFdhMe https://discord.com/invite/UWS6FFdhMe
  • jakobdabo 3y ago
    Congratulations on the release! If I may ask a question - is it possible to register an account without a phone number on a 3-rd party server?
    • jakebsky 3y ago
      Thanks! Yes, it's totally up to a PDS operator to decide how they create user accounts. It's also not required on the Bluesky PDS service any longer, in most cases. By default the self-hosted PDS requires an invite code, to prevent random people from creating an account. Later other options will exist, including OAuth support which is coming soon.
      • jakobdabo 3y ago
        That's great, thanks! > It's also not required on the Bluesky service any longer, in most cases. That's also nice to hear - when last time I tried to register an account (shortly after the free registration launch) the phone number field in the registration form was marked as required, if I am not mistaken.
        • jakebsky 3y ago
          Yeah, you're right, it was. That was temporary measure during the public launch to prevent spam/abuse. We've made some improvements here recently.
    • deleted 3y ago
• Brendinooo 3y ago
  This seems like what Berners-Lee’s Solid project is trying to do, at least in principle. Is that correct? Seems intriguing regardless. Congrats on making it happen!
  • wmf 3y ago
    Solid is more generic than social media but yeah, it has a similar storage/app split as Bluesky.
• r14c 3y ago
  I hope someone comes up with a multi-protocol social server. Bridges are a bad architecture for decentralized systems, because they introduce single points of failure. I can understand using a read-only bridge to mirror content from external resources, but if the other side speaks a federation protocol you should find a way to communicate directly so you don't have to worry about intermediary failures.
  • steveklabnik 3y ago
    Someone has been working on a bridge between BlueSky and Mastodon, and uh, it has generated a TREMENDOUS amount of controversy on the Mastodon side. I have my own biases so I don't want to describe it further than that, nor link to it directly so as not to cause even more disagreement, but the controversy does not seem to faze the developer, so I believe you will have your wish.
    • Ericson2314 3y ago
      I know not the details, but all power to that developer.
    • r14c 3y ago
      A global bridge isn't a multi-protocol social server. The guy is free to do as he likes, but I'm saying I don't think public bridges like that are a good architectural decision for decentralized networks. The individual nodes should implement multi-protocol support instead.
      • vidarh 3y ago
        Some probably will, but I think a fairly substantial part of the Fediverse will ignore Bluesky other than via global bridges unless/until it has a lot of traction. I have two Mastodon instances, and I don't know if I'll bother. If I were to it'd be mostly because I feel that ideologically I think it'd benefit the Fediverse to embrace Bluesky real tight, take their best ideas, extend them, and ensure it feels like Bluesky is just another corner of the Fediverse with some pointless differences.
• steveklabnik 3y ago
  I am very excited that this shipped! I believed the team would pull it off, but there's been a lot of skepticism, some justified, some unjustified, IMHO. Hopefully this will assuage some people's concerns. I am unsure if I am going to run my own just yet. We'll see.
  • jakebsky 3y ago
    Thanks Steve! You've been very fair the entire time and your feedback/thoughts have been helpful.
• tamimio 3y ago
  >You need to join Discord to access the feature Seriously?! Will this trend ever dies?! I don’t want to use discord, can’t they just make a simple request form? Whenever I see “join our discord” for anything in any service I just never use that service, keep it as an option for whoever wants to hangout there just don’t make it the “only” channel of communication!
  • steveklabnik 3y ago
    Is that a direct quote? I don't see it anywhere. What I do see is > Because the PDS distribution is not totally settled, we want to have a line of communication with PDS admins in the network, so we’re asking any developer that plans to run a PDS to join the PDS Admins Discord. https://docs.bsky.app/blog/self-host-federation https://docs.bsky.app/blog/self-host-federation This is much more reasonable than an actual gate on the feature.
    • tamimio 3y ago
      Not a direct quote. But Discord is the only means of communication.
  • jakebsky 3y ago
    This is just for a brief period during polishing/debugging since this is the first time third-party PDS hosts have been added to the network. The goal is just to help PDS operators join the network and make sure that if there's a problem we have a channel of communication open.
    • tamimio 3y ago
      Bluesky has a Matrix dev group (afaik it’s an official one) why not use that too in addition to Discord (or other comms channels)?
      • Arathorn 3y ago
        Unfortunately they declared they didn't have moderation bandwidth to maintain it as an official channel, and then apparently moved to Discord :(
• colesantiago 3y ago
  This is good and all but, sigh are we really celebrating letting self hosting get into the hands of bad actors to federate with Bluesky? And don’t say “lets defederate with said bad actors” since they would still exist and anyone can join said bad actors instances. It’s akin to telling antelopes surrounded by lions to close their eyes and the lions are ‘gone’ yet the lions still exist around them.
  • orthecreedence 3y ago
    Your argument against federation and open communication is that bad people might use it? What's to stop bad people from using the main Bluesky instance?
    • colesantiago 3y ago
      There is a form of moderation on the main instance. A self hosted instance will have no such moderation.
      • orthecreedence 3y ago
        > A self hosted instance will have no such moderation. Maybe I'm missing something here. Are the federated instances less functional than the main instance? Is this some kind of weird freemium thing they're doing? (I'm actually asking, I'm not familiar with Bluesky much at all.)
        • steveklabnik 3y ago
          I have not yet reviewed the code, but the federated instances should be equally as functional as the main instance. However, having the option of functionality does not mean that they will operate the same way. Your parent is not making a technical claim, but a social one: that there will be instances that are effectively unmoderated, because the people who run it hold that up as some kind of ideal, and that that is a problem. I do not share this opinion personally, but have seen many people express it, so I feel like I am representing it accurately. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it's incorrect, and not just an opinion, because unlike in Mastodon, moderation is not tied to your instance. Of course, whoever owns an instance can decide to kick someone off of it, but that's not the primary moderation mechanism in BlueSky, which allows you to choose your own set of moderation tools, regardless of which instance you or anyone else belongs to. I linked to the main three posts to understand BlueSky's moderation stances and features upthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39471973 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39471973
• emceestork 3y ago
  I switched to Bluesky but then moved back to twitter. I'm glad that they are trying to compete with Twitter (Twitter is a conservative cesspool), but all of my non-technical friends have stayed on Twitter. So, I end up going where they are. I think the reason my friends did not join Bluesky despite me inviting them is that it just isn't as good of a product as Twitter. You can't post videos or DM. I am not a tech executive and have no idea about corporate strategy, but it seems like Bluesky should focus less on technical differentiators and more on building killer features that have mass appeal and a community that people want to join. IMHO this milestone, while cool, means absolutely nothing to people outside of the hacker news crowd. I'm rooting for Bluesky, but it seems to me it will die without a critical mass of users. Again, I'm kinda dumb, so this may all be wrong.
  • pfraze 3y ago
    It's a fair point and we definitely debated it, but it was too important to us that we complete the mission.
    • KerrAvon 3y ago
      Debated videos and DM? Mastodon has those features; if you're not doing them at all you may want to reconsider.
      • pfraze 3y ago
        Debated prioritizing them before federation, not debated their existence. They are a must-have for social.
      • danabramov 3y ago
        We definitely want to implement these features, the question was whether they should hold back releasing support for federation or not. Since federation is a core constraint on any features we'd like to build, the team felt that there is no reason to hold federation back, and that releasing it as it's ready makes sense. We're thinking about Bluesky as both a product and a protocol (informing each other's design), and you're 100% right that for the end user, the product itself is what matters. Because we've taken on the decentralization constraint, we take longer to "catch up" to features that centralized platforms tend to have from the start, but it's definitely going to be a major area of focus for us going forward. (Ofc Mastodon isn't centralized, but note that it's had a few years of head start on feature development. We'll get there.)
• heroprotagonist 3y ago
  I looked at the site and I see a lot of comparisons to 'old social'. But for people who might run their own node or decide to commit to the network and encourage their friends to join them, it seems your true major competitor would be projects like mastodon. Yet there are no comparisons on the site. I don't see even see a mention. This makes it difficult to evaluate relative maturity, core competencies, limitations, and risks.
  • danabramov 3y ago
    The linked blog post includes a section called "Does this mean Bluesky is going to be like Mastodon?" which lists a few differences. Is there something in addition that would be worth clarifying? I agree it would be great to include that on the site and not just on the post.
    • heroprotagonist 3y ago
      Thanks for pointing that out! I read again and see the blog post has a summary with 4 very high level points, which I admit I didn't read initially. I saw a wall of text about an expansion and I was still asking myself 'What exactly is Bluesky and how is it different?', so I skipped right to the main site. Having read the post more deeply, particularly the bullet points you mentioned, it looks like there are four really high level differentiators listed: * A focus on the global conversation * Composable moderation * Composable feeds * Account portability The term 'composable' seems almost misused when reading the extended descriptions, and is used differently between points. For example, 'composable moderation' indicates that moderation isn't done on a per-server level. The fundamental censorship and algorithmic prioritization models for distributed social networks seems to have three layers: global (centralized), server, user. In 'old social' the model is basically just 'global', as there are no servers and the only 'user-level' options are those determined by the global operator. It doesn't seem like moderation would truly be 'composable' if it's only set on the global and user (and therefore global via centralized determination of client-level specs) level. It sounds like Facebook except with other people paying the data costs. The next bullet indicates 'composable feeds', which sound like a very nice feature but really don't seem to follow a decentralized model either. The 'composition' does not combine from each global/server/user layer. They sound more like 'custom feeds' which users can define based on global content, using predefined criteria determined by a client (web app) which don't really a way to control the behavior of. Which makes this feature only truly operate on the global layer, and 'custom' rather than 'composable'. It would be on the same level of 'old social' adding a new feature to their web app, more than a fundamental transfer of control to the network. As a result, when the dollars dry up and the feature isn't financially plausible, or a PM somewhere makes a bad decision because he read a blog post about how great it is to destroy user choice, there's risk the feature could go away. Anyway, the question I'm still left with in the end is this. If moderation is done globally, and I can't exercise any control over the prioritization of content beyond what is granted to me by the global provider (even though there are more and better choices than 'old social'), what's the benefit of running a federated node? I don't mean to make it sound like this is some kind of Twitter clone with an SSO login that outsources operational costs to volunteers while still keeping a fundamentally iron grip on control. I'm just honestly confused at the value proposition for volunteers. Exactly how much control is transferred to the network beyond simply hosting data which is displayed according to how the centralized portion of the system determines? It'd be good if the trade-off in terms of time, data, and performance for running your own node was simply to remove the capability of the centralized network to collect user behavioral metrics and such. That's a great and valid reason to host your own service or use a trusted party's service. But there's no mention of this if it is the case. If you provide that already without promoting the fact, maybe bring that up with your marketing team. Anyway that's getting a bit off topic. But to the original point: Ideally, a better comparison would be a dedicated page which coallates every feature of each platform in a grid. A row for each feature. Row cells would fill with 'has' or 'does not have' checkboxes or possibly text where there's something similar but differs sufficiently to require an explanation. Maybe with links to documentation or direct to UI on the line items where appropriate.
• clot27 3y ago
  C'mon ya'll just use AP?
  • steveklabnik 3y ago
    I am not interested in Mastodon and interested in Bluesky partially due to the differences in protocol. "just use AP" isn't interesting. This is. (To me! others feel the exact opposite. Diversity is good here.)
• rvz 3y ago
  Given that there are some so-called Twitter / X alternatives and options to choose from like Threads, Mastodon and Bluesky and are now open for registration, we can now see which platform the most users will choose to go to if a major destructive change happens on X. Once that happens we now wait for the platform that has the most sign ups.
  • threeseed 3y ago
    It's no longer just about Twitter. Meta yesterday integrated Threads with Facebook allowing you to cross post and almost every week they are deepening the integration with Instagram. They are clearly trying to broaden the user base to include the other few billion who never signed up for Twitter.
• numpad0 3y ago
  Bluesky is starting to look like an elaborate reboot of Mastodon with a fancy username redirect, but I'm guessing its technical aspects, while those are series of great achievements, were not the crucial part to its success so far; the part that worked was community building. Nostr worked to some extent despite existence of Mastodon because Mastodon bodged that part. Mastodon took off because Twitter broke its community. Bluesky's successes is really making me feel that the first S of the abbreviation S.N.S. do stand for what it stands.
  • Karrot_Kream 3y ago
    > Bluesky's successes is really making me feel that the first S of the abbreviation S.N.S. do stand for what it stands. There's tons of alternate social media out there. Forums, Subreddits, Tildes, Discourse, Matrix, IRC, Mastodon, Lemmy, Usenet, and on and on. The truth is the S in SNS is always what social networks have been about.
    • numpad0 3y ago
      And a lot of them failed for their technical shortcomings and many others from social aspects. IRC failed in technical side due to the failure in committee development model around IRCv3, Reddit succeeded by sole social factor despite being a carbon copy of Digg. To me, Bluesky vs Mastodon, and also Twitter vs Mastodon situations seems closer to the latter, even with controversial waitlist and the big turmoil, respectively.
      • yborg 3y ago
        >used for 30+ years = failed I don't understand why so many technical people equate monopoly with success. I use IRC every day.
        • numpad0 3y ago
          I hate Electronification, WebNonsensification, Discordification, ... as much as the next guy, but median user age incrementing every year for past 10+ years -> fail to me.
• scudsworth 3y ago
  https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/discussions/1157#discussioncomment-7968714 https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/discussions/1157#d...
• senkora 3y ago
  Somewhat unrelated, but I appreciate the existence of the public firehose endpoint at https://firesky.tv https://firesky.tv and wss://firesky.tv/ws/app It's roughly 10 posts/second, so it's trivial to process it completely locally.
  • consumer451 3y ago
    Does anyone why firesky went from showing the username, to now showing the "did" user code instead? Is this an effort at some privacy in AT?
• lordswork 3y ago
  Bluesky has the technology, now it just needs the network, which is the hard part.
• ThinkBeat 3y ago
  This I applaud as the tech in me. It will quickly become a mess in the real world. People will run pods on cheapest VPS and they will get hacked, run out of money, get bored, go broke etc. Imagine as fractions of content goes missing for a while or is just deleted. One guy runs a small pod with some people, kills it, 60.000 messages gone. How does that impact interconnected discussions? If I own my own data. (good), and I can remove my data if I want (good). Then what happened to a BlueSky conversation I was having with 40 other people? some of whom belong to other pods. Do the conversations remain with just blank lines where I used to be? If not, if the content remains stored somehow then I dont own my data and I cant remove it?
  • brigadier132 3y ago
    > People will run pods on cheapest VPS and they will get hacked, run out of money, get bored, go broke etc. > Imagine as fractions of content goes missing for a while or is just deleted. All of your complaints apply for the internet. Would you say the internet was a bad idea?
  • wmf 3y ago
    With great power comes great responsibility. In a decentralized system you need to take responsibility for your data; specifically you need to backup your data. Bluesky has much better migration/backup/restore than Mastodon. If you want someone else to take responsibility for your data you can use a centralized system like Threads.
  • steveklabnik 3y ago
    > If not, if the content remains stored somehow then I dont own my data and I cant remove it? This is true of any federated system. Once you put things out into the world, you can ask that others delete it, but that doesn't mean they will. Even in centralized systems, things like archive.org exist. In some sense, public statements are always immutable.
  • charcircuit 3y ago
    PDS are crawled by relays who cache the messages and can offer a holistic view over many PDSs for client apps to use. If a PDS goes down the data would still be stored by the relay.
• busymom0 3y ago
  Does anyone know how this differs from the Nostr protocol?
  • wmf 3y ago
    It's free of any association with cryptocurrency for one thing.
    • busymom0 3y ago
      I was asking about protocol, not content.
  • ibz 3y ago
    Nostr is relays + clients. BlueSky is PDS + relays + clients. If you look at the history of Nostr and try to really understand the protocol, where it came from and what it was trying to solve, Nostr was also meant to work on a PDS + relay model, except it degenerated to the point where most Nostr app developers are simply writing Javascript browser apps that use relays as a "poor man's cloud", sort of, without any consideration for achieving self-sovereignty of the user. "I save the data in the 6 most popular Nostr relays and done." is what 99% of the so called "Nostr apps" do. Sounds good in theory, until it is not. Relays were really meant to be treated as ephemeral actors, that come and go, and data was meant to be stored somewhere the user was in control of, but instead, relays are treated as some sort of reincarnation of IPFS, where you save your data and have it safe forever. Bluesky seems to solve this by introducing the concept of PDS. It's not like PDSes cannot be built for Nostr - there are indeed some Nostr apps that work using the PDS model - save the data in a place the user has complete control of, and then propagate it to relays. The benefit of Bluesky seems to me that it formalizes the concept of PDSes, so that app developers don't have to think about it and cannot mistake the relays for PDSes.
• ApolloFortyNine 3y ago
  Does Bluesky allow different federations to require everyone they federate with to share a block list? Mastodon has this problem and it makes it where you have to have multiple accounts if you actually want to use the platform. This might sound like not a problem, but it'll naturally lead to whatever account has access to 51% of your content being the one you use consistently, and you eventually just forget about the other 49%.
  • steveklabnik 3y ago
    I linked to primary sources on moderation upthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39471973 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39471973 Block lists don't work at the instance level, so the answer to your question isn't just "no", but that it is impossible.
    • vidarh 3y ago
      Only in the strictest sense and if you assume nobody will build graphs of interactions to use to block instead.
      • steveklabnik 3y ago
        Sure, I was assuming "within the context of the protocol," because if we're willing to step out of that, then literally anything can happen.
        • vidarh 3y ago
          It's a fairly safe assumption in this instance given how important these features are for people - either BlueSky will never get much traction, or people will add ways to achieve the same result. Personally, I'm not very block-happy, but I still have a few instance-wide blocks in place for my even my single-person instance on Mastodon because there are literally a few instances full of nazis, run by nazis, where blocking one puts you at risk of brigading. I'm in a privileged enough position to have relatively little to worry about, but this also extends to a safety issue for a lot of communities, where harassment and threats spill over into the "real world", and where being able to put in place broad, expansive blocks to minimize the ability for individuals who consider themselves "wronged" by one of their victims to utilize their communities to strike is the bare minimum when there isn't a central authority putting efforts into getting rid of these users.
• lancelot-c 3y ago
  Farcaster and Lens are much better alternatives than Bluesky. Not only you host your own data but you can choose your frontend and permissionlessly use the protocol backend. Web3 is the way to go for social media.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • _3e1t 3y ago
    web3 = crypto = scams and weird scammy people. going to be hard to undo that association but good luck!
  • digging 3y ago
    Web3 for social media? Isn't it just a crypto scam framework?
  • r721 3y ago
    Why do Farcaster proponents never mention that it's not free in their pitches? >To sign up, users must pay a $5 sign-up fee, meant to prevent the creation of spam accounts. Further, users can only post a limited number of “casts” on Farcaster apps, which are tied to packages called storage units. Storage units, which go for $5 a piece, grant a user 5,000 casts, 2,500 reactions, and 2,500 links or photo posts within a one-year period.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• alexiaya 3y ago
  This is nice, but I'm confused about one thing: how can instance owners ensure illegal content such as CSAM doesn't get cached on their servers if defederation is not a thing?
  • shkkmo 3y ago
    My understanding is that a PDS instance only hosts data for it's users. Caching can happen at Relays or AppViews and those will presumably need to do something to avoid caching CSAM.
• overstay8930 3y ago
  When is this going to support IPv6-only hosting? Would've loved to set up an instance to mess around with but requiring IPv4 is a showstopper for folks behind CGNAT (i.e. most people on earth).
  • jakebsky 3y ago
    CGNAT is for IPv4, so users can share IPs. It's pretty hard to use the internet without IPv4 access today, so it's not that much of a limitation. But we do certainly plan to make IPv6 work on all our network services.
    • overstay8930 3y ago
      That’s… not what I said. If you want other people to host services (like to federate), it’s going to be pretty impossible for the vast majority of people to actually do it if you only allow IPv4 connections. You cannot federate behind CGNAT, and most folks can only open ports over IPv6, because they don’t live in America where everyone can get their own public IPv4 address. This is a pretty big miss IMO.
      • jakebsky 3y ago
        Okay, I get what you're saying. Yes, hosting a PDS server behind NAT is a problem. 1. The expected scenario is that people would run PDS hosts on small VMs (Digital Ocean, Vultr, AWS, etc) where an IPv4 address is the default. 2. People running PDS hosts behind NAT would use a tunnel service of some kind (Cloudflare Tunnel, Tailscale Funnel, Ngrok, etc). But IPv6 is something we do want to support, and it won't be a huge effort. It will just take a bit of time to get to it.
        • PLG88 3y ago
          Another option is using zrok - https://zrok.io/ https://zrok.io/. Its open source so you could build it directly into Bluesky and either host the backend yourself or use the zrok free SaaS. zrok also has SDKs so you could embed the capability directly into your binaries without having a separate agent.
• nikolay 3y ago
  I love Bluesky, but not having DMs is a deal breaker!
• BeetleB 3y ago
  The real question: How many of the well know personalities will abandon Mastodon for this? Mastodon has a surprising number of famous personalities. Many popular open source developers live there. Lots of well known people in math/science (Terry Tao, etc). Lots of authors (Greg Egan, Neil Gaiman, etc). Lots of open source orgs. Will they be willing to move networks yet again? Twitter made them unhappy. Will Mastodon be so poor (and Bluesky more superior) to get them to move again? Live and die by network effects.
  • wahnfrieden 3y ago
    It depends which one 100x’s the other
  • consumer451 3y ago
    > Live and die by network effects. If I have my facts straight, they have gone from 2M to 5M users since they opened to the public just 17 days ago. And btw, using Neil Gaiman as an example, he is prolific on Bluesky. He has 861 posts on Mastodon, vs 4.5k on Bsky. He seems to have already made the move to a large extent. https://bsky.app/profile/neilhimself.neilgaiman.com https://bsky.app/profile/neilhimself.neilgaiman.com https://mastodon.social/@neilhimself https://mastodon.social/@neilhimself
• fiatjaf 3y ago
  What is the point of hosting your own data? You don't gain anything from that, right?
  • wmf 3y ago
    Other people can't delete your account or your data. (They can moderate it into oblivion instead.)
• Repulsion9513 3y ago
  > Specifically, each PDS will be able to host 10 accounts and limited to 1500 evts/hr and 10,000 evts/day Can't have anyone competing with you, after all!
  • mschuster91 3y ago
    Basic anti-spam. Just look on Mastodon (and the thankless job of many instance mods) or on how Twitter gets overrun with porn, crypto, crypto scam or troll bots...
    • donio 3y ago
      For what its worth I've yet to see any spam at all in my Mastodon feeds (regular user for about a year, accounts on multiple instances). Much respect to the admins for staying on top of it.
    • Repulsion9513 3y ago
      Ah yes, incredibly low limits with no way to say "hey look we're quality, let us do more". That's "basic anti-spam". Sure. It's actually "you can host yourself and your friends but anyone who doesn't know someone with a server and technical knowledge must use our platform"
      • jakebsky 3y ago
        These are just the initial limits while we work out any issues. It'd be bad for everyone if the network was immediately overrun with spammers launching PDS hosts with millions of fake users/posts, etc. Even though our infra might be able to weather this kind of abuse, there are many independent feed generators (custom algorithms) operated by individuals that would likely fall over. The plan is to increase limits sufficiently to account for all legitimate usage. (It's also worth pointing out that these limits only apply to our Relay service. The expectation is that there will be other Relays on the network in the future.)
      • x-complexity 3y ago
        > Ah yes, incredibly low limits with no way to say "hey look we're quality, let us do more". That's "basic anti-spam". Sure. Then please suggest how they can remedy this problem without giving spammers the same opportunity. - Requiring upfront financial commitments would deter most low-yield spams, at the cost of raising requirements for running your own node - Domain-based filtering likely works for this, but this brings back in the topic of censorship (see Mastadon's domain blocking) > It's actually "you can host yourself and your friends but anyone who doesn't know someone with a server and technical knowledge must use our platform" You're complaining about the immediate first steps and how it doesn't immediately land on the moon. Simplifying the deployment process for everyone else still takes time. At minimum: - Purchasing gateway for a custom domain name (requires partnerships with domain name sellers) - Server/Compute+DB rental gateway (because the average normal person doesn't have the hardware to run the service 24/7, nor do they want to know about Linux) - Togglable automatic updates to the federation service Each simplification would require effort on the devs & partners to setup & maintain.
• DerSaidin 3y ago
  Can a server hosting an account read all of the data belonging to that account? The feature I'd like to see from federated social network like this is encrypt everything to keys only held client side (in the style of keybase), so servers can't read content (only some surrounding metadata so they know which other servers to communicate with about the content).
  • DerSaidin 3y ago
    > Bluesky is a public social network. > The AT Protocol, which Bluesky is built on, is designed to support public conversations. Ah, ok.
• sli 3y ago
  This is really cool but I think "improving" social media is just going deeper into the hole. The incentives are just too perverse and hosting stuff is too expensive.
  • medstrom 3y ago
    Interesting. What's this hole? I used Reddit and HN for a decade without complaint (well, the quality of Reddit nosedived a few months ago). Seems to me like they can last pretty long without perverse incentives. Bbcode forums have often been nice too.
• fiatjaf 3y ago
  10 months later, this description of Bluesky is still accurate: https://fiatjaf.com/ab1127fb.html https://fiatjaf.com/ab1127fb.html
  • jakebsky 3y ago
    In fact, it's mostly inaccurate. > "the protocol has an official webpage with a waitlist and a private beta?" Both the waitlist and the private beta are gone. > "The “protocol” is just a description of whatever the Bluesky app and servers do, it can and does change anytime the Bluesky developers decide they want to change it" 1. atproto is well documented and the plan and desire is to make it a proper internet standard. 2. There are hundreds of independent projects relying on the protocol to create alternative clients and custom feeds (algorithms). 3. The protocol includes namespaced schemas so that different apps can evolve without breaking each other e.g. the "app.bsky" namespace is for the Bluesky microblogging app. > "The “DID Placeholder” method..." There is already support for did:web and plans to support other DID methods, including potentially (non-POW) blockchain methods. > "All posts go through the Bluesky central server..." All posts go through any Relay that anyone cares to operate. It's also possible to fetch posts directly form the origin PDS host, it's just slower and results in more load on the PDS. > "And you, as a reader, doesn’t have any control of what you’re reading from either..." Apps are in full control over where they get posts from. An app can enable users to select a Relay/AppView or fetch posts directly from the origin PDS. > "But I fail to see why even more than one network provider will exist,..." People may want to operate their own Relay/AppView services so they have more control for their specific application, for higher performance (latency/throughput) reasons, or for geographic/jurisdictional reasons, to name a few. And the compute/network requirements are not beyond the capabilities of small startups, non-profits, coops, or public services and likely never will be.
• jrm4 3y ago
  To me, the only question worth asking is the following. If a hypothetical guy, let's say his name is Melon Usk (lol) tries to buy or otherwise influence Bluesky, he's going to still mostly be able to do it with this relatively centralized moderation model, yes? This feels like "thanks for offloading some of the data, but we still retain most of the useful control?"
  • danpalmer 3y ago
    No. There are two components: data storage, and "indexing". You can always, feasibly, own your data. Being your own indexer is less feasible, but you'd choose one like you'd choose a Mastodon instance or something. Portability is trivial because you have the data. "Usk" buys your indexer to put ads on it, you can just move. Moderation only controls what you see on your feed, using a different indexer just means logging into a different site and seeing a slightly different set of posts.
    • jrm4 3y ago
      I'm confused, your first word is "no," but your answer seems to suggest "yes, usk would be able to have considerable influence" Which is to say, neither storage nor indexing -- but moderation -- the ability to have control over that would be the most important thing. "Usk" buys (or otherwise leverages money to be able to put his thumb on the control of ) bluesky's moderation. Data storage just gives you the ability to leave? What am I missing?
      • Karrot_Kream 3y ago
        Posts on AT are content-addressed. The feeds, as they're called now, just return content links. If "Usk" buys a feed provider it's trivial to move to another one. If you're curious why running a feed is more expensive than simply storing data, it's because you need to ingest the actual data for these links before figuring out what to serve in a feed. This storing, indexing, and aggregating is expensive.
        • danpalmer 3y ago
• iteratethis 3y ago
  I really like the fresh ideas in Bluesky, in this case especially the different ideas regarding federation in comparison to Mastodon. I've tried Mastodon extensively and it is lacking in so many ways. There's no algorithmic feed other than "popular" (on large instances) which shows the same 10 people posting for months in a row, daily. Hence, discovery of people and content is very hard. No content or people are recommended and search is broken. Ordinary people not belonging to some cultish niche have a very hard time compiling a good feed, if they even understand it at all. Federation itself is broken. The boosts and comments to a post do not accurately synchronize across the network, it depends on some complicated logic regarding whom from your instance follows anybody else from the other instance. The bottom line is that you may see 3 boosts whilst the original has 12. You may not care about boosts, but it's a disaster for comments/replies. Everybody is seeing a different subset of replies to the same damn post. It drives the OP mad because there will be 20 people replying the same thing because they cannot see that others already said it. Instances have too much power over moderation. They control whom the instance federates with server to server. You may be following somebody on another instance but your instance owner defederates and now your connection is gone. This ability to not just moderate content but heavily impact your social graph isn't seen anywhere else. And this ability is heavily used as Mastodon is a network of activists. Combine this over-use of moderation with the idea that instances go under all the time, and the only sane thing to do for most people is to join the default instance. Here you'll have reasonable "mainstream" moderation and the biggest federation reach with other instances/services. Which kind of defeats the point of a distributed social network. I'm still impressed by what Mastodon has accomplished given its grass root origin and shoestring budget, but it's no social media of the future. I don't know if Bluesky is, but at least it has a better design regarding nomadic identities, a user's ability to self-moderate, content protection, etc.
  • Saris 3y ago
    All good points and I've experienced similar.
• deadbabe 3y ago
  Why do people value their data so highly? Can’t you just be ephemeral and delete your posts after a few days? Seems like nothing good comes from having a huge history of things you posted on a social network.
• stevenicr 3y ago
  So what data goes and what data is blocked by transitioning away from the main server? I am assuming a person's own posts would come along, but what about conversations with other people, or group discussions or things you have followed? Any other features that would work / things you could see if still connected but no be available if you were federated and banned? I think fbook has a hidden 'export your posts to WP' option somewhere, and you can download a copy of your data (if you are not banned / can still login) - but that data would not include replies in groups, marketplace, etc (? haven't checked, I'm sure other things) I read they were turning off the groups access API and may not be offering a replacement option.. I think there is reasonable debate as to whether or not group posts and such should or should not be included in a data dump / backup.. Also not familiar with features that bluesky or mastadon or twitter do or do not have and what would break if you moved your data (would only your part of dms/chats come along? pictures others sent you or posted? )
  • steveklabnik 3y ago
    > So what data goes and what data is blocked by transitioning away from the main server? Nothing. It is fully transparent to everyone. Your followers won't notice, and you won't notice. Everything Just Works.
    • stevenicr 3y ago
      So if you port your stuff and blusky bans you, you keep all your posts, all your friends posts, all your groups' info, all your DMS, everything.. .. and the only thing that happens is you can't send data to/through blusky (or receive?) any more and and new data ? I'd like to test this, any way to get someone from blusky to ban an account to test this?
      • steveklabnik 3y ago
        > you keep all your posts Yes, but there are some small caveats to how this works exactly, based on the architecture. I'll get to it. > all your friends posts Your friends weren't banned, you don't have their posts in the first place. > all your DMS AT is 100% public, there are no DMs. > you can't send data to/through blusky (or receive?) any more and and new data ? Okay so, we have to talk about the architecture of BlueSky here. There's a few moving parts: * PDS: personal data server. This holds your posts and such. Before this announcement, BlueSky ran the only PDS. What's happened today is that new PDSes are able to federate with the BlueSky run PDS. * Relay: this is a server that aggregates data from multiple PDSes. Relays replicate data from the PDSes, and present it as one firehose of information. In some sense, today's announcement is "BlueSky's Relay will now replicate data from PDSes other than theirs." * App View: this is a service that takes the information from one or more Relays, combines it with whatever other things they care about, and presents the information to an end user. bsky.app is an App View. I like to think about this like git and GitHub. Your PDS is like a git repository. BlueSky is like GitHub. So, when BlueSky bans you, aka, when GitHub takes down your git repository on their site, what that means is that they have decided they no longer wish to host your PDS, and they don't let you use their App View. However, if you have a local copy of your PDS, you can simply host it elsewhere, and notify the relay of it, or join a PDS that's already federating with a known relay. Once you do that, you can resume posting. If you don't have a copy of the PDS, I believe you can reconstruct it from the copies that have been federated around the network, but this part is a bit fuzzy to me. Even then, saying "Hey my PDS lives over here now" means your new posts will still get pushed around the network, and the people following you will see them, but you may need to rebuild your following list. It's also important to note that like, BlueSky's relay could say "never replicate posts from this PDS", but that's why there's multiple relays. If you don't like BlueSky's policies about their relay or app view, use one that implements the policies you care about. > I'd like to test this, any way to get someone from blusky to ban an account to test this? This is one step towards realizing this future; for now you have to manually tell BlueSky to federate with your new PDS. The truly federated network is sloooowly coming online. So things will get there.
• zackify 3y ago
  I just got this setup using Docker on https://fly.io https://fly.io. It's running with wayyyy less resources than the github suggested. I am on a shared cpu with 512mb of ram running the container. Could be a little simpler to setup, if the docs provided a docker run example without the shell scripts. Also has some duplicate env variables. For anyone interested, I shared it in the discord: https://discord.com/channels/1207024379549061120/1207050328063610923/1210367154709463040 https://discord.com/channels/1207024379549061120/12070503280... Overall super cool. My profile page says I am using an invalid handle, but otherwise it works, and I see it requesting my server for things.
  • crossroadsguy 3y ago
    You have shared a discord link. Does it allow publicly accessible links now? I was shown a login/signup screen.
    • zackify 3y ago
      The invite link is in the blog post. Assuming anyone can go to it after joining. In the example I just hard code the env variables to demonstrate, but you’d want them in secrets after testing it out.
      • slily 3y ago
        In case you are unaware, it's considered poor etiquette to share links to login-walled social networks, and something like Discord that forces you to join a chatroom with unknown implications (it may trigger a message drawing attention to you, it may require account verification, it may require manual action from a moderator, etc.) just to access some information, all that on top of requiring an account to view anything, is far worse. You can easily share information through one of the countless Pastebin clones out there.
        • zackify 3y ago
          I only did it because they’re requiring anyone who wants to launch their own self hosted install, to join this exact discord and fill out an application form…. So anyone who wants to run this, has to join that discord anyway. You can find it in the blog post.
• grey_earthling 3y ago
  I haven't followed the tech of Bluesky or the AT Protocol closely: does this step mean that people can now set up their own Bluesky instances? Where can I see one in the wild?
  • wmf 3y ago
    Bluesky doesn't have "instances", it has PDSes, Relays, and AppViews. People can run their own PDSes but PDSes are kind of invisible so you won't "see" them. You'll just see the whole Bluesky network as usual.
    • grey_earthling 3y ago
      What I mean is: where is the website other than bsky.app where I can see content from the network?
      • jakebsky 3y ago
        The bsky.app web app is a JavaScript app that runs in a browser. It talks to an AppView (API server) which talks to a Relay which talks to all PDS hosts on the network. There are other clients for Bluesky that do the same thing as the bsky.app web app: https://docs.bsky.app/showcase?tags=client https://docs.bsky.app/showcase?tags=client
• milewskahadlaw 3y ago
  When do you think Bluesky will be officially a broad public social media network? It seems rather niche at this point
  • steveklabnik 3y ago
    What do you define as "broad"? I'm not going to claim BlueSky is mega popular, but to put a number on it, hit 5 million users today. That's not huge, but it's also not small.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• ineedaj0b 3y ago
  What happens when the bots show up? Do they have anything to defend against that?
  • jakebsky 3y ago
    Yes, we have an "AutoMod" system and other protections in place. But it is a cat-and-mouse game, so we expect it to be one of the challenges. But because the network is completely open, it's also something anyone who is interested can help with.
• DinaCoder99 3y ago
  > Your Mastodon timeline is only made up of posts from accounts you follow, and does not pull together posts from the whole network like Bluesky’s custom feeds. This seems like a major win for Mastodon. Bluesky is clearly spinning this as a positive, however, so what am I missing?
  • steveklabnik 3y ago
    These are optional things that you choose, and you can even write yourself. The default feeds are "posts of accounts you follow," just like Mastodon, so it's a positive because it's extra possibility on top. As a meaningful example: someone (not BlueSky themselves, I don't believe) published a "Quiet Posters" feed. I have subscribed to that. Now, in addition to "Following," and "For You," I have a "Quiet Posters" feed. This exclusively shows posts by people who don't post very often. Since subscribing to it, I have seen a lot more content from the folks who aren't as chatty as the people who fill up my timeline. That's very nice.
• ulrischa 3y ago
  Self hosting your Postings is really a Fediverse Killerfeature. But it should be as simple as storing it on my shared hosting space.
• jillesvangurp 3y ago
  I'm happy to see they dropped phone verification via SMS. I was critical about it a few weeks ago because 1) it's a dumb thing to do in 2024 and 2) it didn't actually work for me (they were trying to be too clever with German phone numbers and I couldn't get past their broken validation). I just signed up without that nonsense and it worked. Thank you! Great to see companies taking feedback seriously.
  • Reptur 3y ago
    Agreed, not to mention phone numbers can easily be used by entities to ID anyone's account which has a chilling effect on freedom of expression.
• dartharva 3y ago
  This would have been formidable if only it weren't a year late. The height of transition from X/Twitter is over.
  • consumer451 3y ago
    I believe that they have gone from 2M to 5M users since they opened to the public 17 days ago. All is not lost.
• jillesvangurp 3y ago
  Is there any good reason not to implement activity pub on top of bluesky? It seems that with all the twitter alternatives out there that are actively promoting federation as a thing, job #1 ought to be federating with each other.
  • steveklabnik 3y ago
    See this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39471556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39471556
• TabTwo 3y ago
  They only do IPv4, right? At least the only mention v4 addresses on the GitHub page.
  • jakebsky 3y ago
    For now, yes, our network services are IPv4 only.