Let's clarify something: does Bluesky allow federated servers on their network? Is there a list of those independent servers?

BeAware , 47 minutes ago

@Blaze

Long winded, nuanced answer, ready your eyeballs:

It's a bit complicated, but since we're on Fediverse and at least somewhat familiar with how things work here, I'll try to explain with that comparison in mind.

On Fediverse, instances are in control of the user data directly. To "migrate" your account, you'd be switching instances and admins entirely.

BlueSky splits things up quite a bit more.

There, you can host your own "PDS" or Personal Data Server. That hosts your account and post info only.

Then, there's the "AppView". In comparison to Fediverse, these are like Lemmy, Mastodon, Mbin, etc. Right now, there's VERY few Appviews to choose from.

Then, there's the "relay". Which to Fediverse, the only thing similar is also relays, but they work differently. On BlueSky, they relay every post and interactions of all the PDS data that connect to AppViews. I do not think there's a choice on what is relayed, just a huge firehose. That being said, they're not optional like Fediverse. To complete the network, relays are required on ATProto and apparently could be expensive to host, so right now, it appears the only relay is hosted by BlueSky the company. Which makes things slightly centralized.

Now, that we have those definitions out of the way, this is where things get a bit muddy and a bit of purposeful corporate created confusion for purpose of selfishness is quite apparent.

Right now, there's very few AppViews. The ones I'm aware of are, BlueSky itself, Whitewind, and Frontpage.xyz.

The confusion happens because BlueSky, the company, doesn't separate the fact that accounts hosted on self-hosted PDS, aren't technically Bluesky accounts, they're ATproto accounts. Everywhere you look to login, it says "login using your BlueSky account". I can only assume they're doing this on purpose so that anyone who tries to make an Appview, host a PDS, AND a relay, can't have their own "identity" like different instances and platforms have here on Fedi.

That will confuse people and make them think everything is just hosted by BlueSky the company. However, as we've now established, there's definitely a separation of "Bluesky" the company, "BlueSky" the AppView that you can login to using your "BlueSky" account, which doesnt technically have to be hosted by anything related to BlueSky.

I hope this all makes sense and you can tell that technically things are decentralized for the most part. It's just that BlueSky is purposefully muddying their own definitions of things so that anyone that tries to build on ATproto, has a hard time making themselves known as not bluesky due to the way they conflate all these definitions.

Sorry for the huge post and hope it makes sense in some way.

Thanks for reading.😁👍

@fediverse

tengkuizdihar , 31 minutes ago

So its activitypub, but worse because its designed from the ground up to be difficult to federate? Bro just use twitter at this point.

BeAware , 25 minutes ago

@tengkuizdihar well, it's not difficult to federate, it's difficult to seperate your identity from BlueSky itself, if you're trying to create something on ATproto.

I doubt you'll see big news about a service using ATproto, the way Fedi platforms do, besides BlueSky because they really don't want you to differentiate that way.🤦‍♂️

@fediverse

nate , 1 hour ago (edited 1 hour ago)

@Blaze AT (Bluesky's protocol) is a little bit different then activity pub. There's two types of servers, a PDS and a relay. A PDS is basically a git repository of all your posts/interactions, it's super lightweight and doesn't do anything but host them and provide it to any server that asks for it. The PDS basically does the profile hosting portion of a Mastodon server, and is very similar to a Nostr relay if you're familiar with that.

A relay accesses data across a bunch of PDSs and provides it as one big network to the relay's users. It's basically the equivalent of the federated portion of what a Mastodon server does. It's also doing what a Nostr client does (although Nostr does that on the user's device) if you're familiar with that.

Any relay can pull data from any PDS, so theoretically it's very decentralized since anybody could host either a PDS and/or Relay. Bluesky was opened up very recently though, so there's not many non-Bluesky-hosted PDSs on the network yet and most are small and experimental. There's also no relays other than Bluesky that I'm aware of, although it's only been open for ~6 months so I expect that'd change soon.

Blaze OP , 47 minutes ago

There’s also no relays other than Bluesky that I’m aware of, although it’s only been open for ~6 months so I expect that’d change soon.

Thanks for clarifying!

haui_lemmy , 1 hour ago

So, from up close it seems like people can have their own servers (i checked wurzelmann.at which is currently on the frontpage) but they do not seem to have their own frontend.

This indeed makes it so that for people to actually SEE your content you must federate with one entity and are controlled by them.

Imo this is very bad because it takes the freedom out of federation. Yes, you dont need to login to an app but if they ban you or defederate or delete your post, nobody will see it, right?

Please someone who has tried and gets the technical details shed light on this.

nate , 1 hour ago

@haui_lemmy @Blaze Yeah, it's very centralized at the moment. The idea of AT is that you can host your own Relay as well as PDS, so if I didn't like Bluesky I could make Nate's relay and have my relay pull the posts from the PDSs of the people I follow and sidestep Bluesky entirely. Though Bluesky was only opened up very recently so Bluesky is the only relay I know of ATM.

skullgiver , 1 hour ago

I mean, you can run your own frontend if you want to? If you can run a backend, you can run a frontend. You can’t get away with hosting a relay or an app view, though, you need to host a full personal data server, with your own indexers and everything. You can also rely on external indexing, but then you turn dependent on the servers you interact with.

As for federation, you can federate with smaller services just fine, but Bluesky’s design makes it very centralised around the main server. There’s nothing on the protocol level that enforces federation with the main site.

This is a bit like with the Fediverse: for a couple of years, the only relevant service on there was Mastodon, specifically a few larger Mastodon servers. If you didn’t federate with them, you may as well not have federated at all. This also made some of Mastodon’s weird quirks de facto standards for Fediverse support (like how some ActivityPub object types aren’t supported, and people put every huge web page in a “post” object so it would be rendered by Mastodon).

If the main Bluesky server bans you, there’s nothing preventing other Bluesky instances from indexing your content just as easily.

If anything, this setup allows for more freedom than (for instance) Lemmy does. If Lemmy.world bans you, you can’t post in their communities anymore. Other servers can’t discover your attempts to post, so your local posts will remain local, out of reach of any ActivityPub server. Sure someone could scan the Lemmy API for differing posts, but that’s not how Federation is implemented here.

On Bluesky, independent servers can (should) index each other using the standard API. You can get banned from bsky.app, but other servers can still see your posts pop up in their feed.

I don’t know for sure how banning works on a technical level, but it is my understanding that moderation on Bluesky is actually done not dissimilarly to nostr. Everything gets processed and stored, but there’s a layer between the database and the frontends that handles blocking and banning. Of course Bluesky could disable federation with your server entirely, but it seems to me like they’d still federate your content even if your account is banned using normal banning tools, unless other servers propagate your ban as well. That’s up to them to decide. This too is unlike ActivityPub, where an account ban will also halt propagation.

From what I can tell, it’s perfectly possible to set up an independent Bluesky network. The only issue is that Bluesky users don’t give a shit about federation and won’t move to any alternative server, so if you want to reach them, you need to play nice with the main instance.

Blaze OP , 45 minutes ago

From what I can tell, it’s perfectly possible to set up an independent Bluesky network. The only issue is that Bluesky users don’t give a shit about federation and won’t move to any alternative server, so if you want to reach them, you need to play nice with the main instance.

Makes sense

flamingos , 57 minutes ago

Their app is open source, but it doesn’t give any instructions on how to self-host it, in fact it seems to not have been designed with self-hosting in mind given the forking section of the ReadMe:

You have our blessing 🪄✨ to fork this application! However, it’s very important to be clear to users when you’re giving them a fork.

Please be sure to:

• Change all branding in the repository and UI to clearly differentiate from Bluesky.
• Change any support links (feedback, email, terms of service, etc) to your own systems.
• Replace any analytics or error-collection systems with your own so we don’t get super confused.

The impression I get from Bluesky is that it doesn’t view federation as a core feature of its platform, just a nice technical oddity. I’m no expert on the AT protocol, but from a quick skim of the quickstart, their view of federation seems to be having disparate data repositories (Personal Data Servers) app developers can put their app data into. It doesn’t really seems to be about different software communicating with each other.

In contrast, ActivityPub is about passing JSON between servers in a somewhat standard format so different software can reasonably understand what that JSON represents and act on it in a way that makes sense for that software.

(But again, I’m don’t know anything about the AT protocol, I could be completely wrong here)

haui_lemmy , 39 minutes ago

Thanks for chiming in. Thats very insightful. It still seems like bsky is claiming to be something that its not.

ruud , 1 hour ago

I have setup bskysocial.world to test that (there’s no web interface, just select this domain when logging in or signing up via the app or bsky.app)

Note: This is for testing only, I can’t promise it will remain running.

(I am @ruud.bskysocial.world)

Blaze OP , 1 hour ago

Thank you Ruud!

If I understand correctly, using a custom domain name still makes you use the central Bluesky server, right?

ByteMe , 2 hours ago

I think they do but they use AT protocol (theirs) instead of ActivityPub so that’s why you don’t see them in mastodon and they don’t have many servers in federation

Blaze OP , 2 hours ago

Indeed, but I’m a bit surprised there isn’t any list of alternatives servers.

I would have to look more into the protocol specification, but it seems like this isn’t really federation, alternative servers are still relying on the central server, and that’s why nobody bothers with setting one up

hoshikarakitaridia , 1 hour ago

That sounds like a really dumb design idea. Why make a federating protocol if you still rely on the server? I don’t even get why they did it at all then.

That’s indeed very interesting and peculiar.

Blaze OP , 1 hour ago

They could pretend to be federated while they’re not.

Might show them in a more positive light to the general public

poVoq , 1 hour ago

There are some people hosting their own identity server, but yes the centralisation of the main aggregator server seems to be by design as they even scare people away from trying by talking about the high resource requirements of doing so.

IMHO Bluesky is only federated in the sense that responsibility for content and moderation can be outsourced, but the user endpoint stays mostly in control of Bluesky. This makes a lot of sense if you think about it from a company perspective… outsource the legally and personnel critical parts and keep the ones that are lucrarive for advertisement and can be easily scaled by throwing hardware at it.

But you must be a real sucker to take them up on that very one sided offer…

ada , 1 hour ago

Why would someone host a server and pay for it out of their own pocket, when the protocol just turns in to an invisible piece of infrastructure that people don’t even know exists?

AP instances allow for communities and identity to build around them, so there is a non monetary incentive to running them, but what’s the incentive to run an equivalent on AP and make it public?

Blaze OP , 42 minutes ago

Definitely, that’s why I guess there are still no other server than Bluesky’s

ReeSilva , 2 hours ago

🎯