Bluesky Now Open To Federation 26
Longtime Slashdot reader Rei writes: In a blog post today, Bluesky, the social media network founded by Jay Graber, announced that they have finally opened to federation. Users can now operate their own PDS (backend) servers. How to do so is discussed on the developers' blog and a new Discord channel for PDS administrators.
As the blog notes, there are key differences between the AT Protocol/Bluesky federation and ActivityPub/Mastodon federation, including: global conversation (rather than local-server based with remote content only brought in from follows); a decentralized user account not bound to a specific host; user-composable moderation lists not inherently tied to a specific server, offsetting the need for defederation; user-composable feeds/algorithms, not tied to servers; and full account portability, without the need to be initiated by your server, protecting users from rogue admins or servers that disappear.
Despite the difference, a number of projects, such as Bridgy-Fed, plan to bridge Bluesky and Mastodon together, with all of Bluesky appearing as a single Mastodon server on ActivityPub, and Mastodon users being translated to a decentralized identifier (DID) for AT Protocol (atproto) calls.
As the blog notes, there are key differences between the AT Protocol/Bluesky federation and ActivityPub/Mastodon federation, including: global conversation (rather than local-server based with remote content only brought in from follows); a decentralized user account not bound to a specific host; user-composable moderation lists not inherently tied to a specific server, offsetting the need for defederation; user-composable feeds/algorithms, not tied to servers; and full account portability, without the need to be initiated by your server, protecting users from rogue admins or servers that disappear.
Despite the difference, a number of projects, such as Bridgy-Fed, plan to bridge Bluesky and Mastodon together, with all of Bluesky appearing as a single Mastodon server on ActivityPub, and Mastodon users being translated to a decentralized identifier (DID) for AT Protocol (atproto) calls.
Good news everyone (Score:2)
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I'll take "Things That Don't Even Remotely Describe ATProto" for $1000, Alex.
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Re: Will this make it bulletproof? (Score:4, Interesting)
Meanwhile in the real world I just downloaded a CAR [ipld.io] of everything I ever posted on Bluesky along with all of the metadata associated with my DID (Distributed ID), which can be reuploaded to any PLD [bsky.app], but you keep telling yourself whatever you need to to justify your hate.
Seriously, ATProto is open. Actually look at the protocol at some point. The entire thing is designed start to finish around decentralization.
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You do realize that relays are also designed to be federated, right?
No, no, I got it: they designed it to be federated, but secretly plan to never actually do so.
The exact same thing you people said about PDSs. And before that, feeds.
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That statement is nonsensical. Relays don't interact with each other. A PDS can subscribe to as many relays as it wants. The relays *themselves* don't interact.
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Then why did you talk about relays talking to each other, when that has nothing to do with the design?
There's no such thing as "a mastodon client". Do you mean a web browser / app? In which case, you're comparing to the appview, not the PDS.
Please stop being so vague. Are you talking about appview, PDS or relay?
Appview or PDS: Just host your own.
Relay: The relay'
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** Just host your own, or use someone else's third party one.
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But not ActivityPub native (Score:2)
Kind of stupid to shun an open protocol designed expressly for this purpose.
Re:But not ActivityPub native (Score:5, Insightful)
It was literally designed to fix the problems of ActivityPub. As discussed in the announcement link of TFA [bsky.social].
You can't fix ActivityPub's weaknesses without serious changes to the protocol. This became clear early on in the Matrix Room, where ActivityPub was extensively discussed.
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The design of ActivityPub makes Mastodon a very different place to twitter and Blue Sky. It's not necessarily better or worse, just different. More of a village than a vibrant city.
It will be interesting to see how it changes, if it does. It would be nice if Blue Sky continued to grow and replaced Twitter too.
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Every company could make the excuse that they're "fixing" an open standard by implementing a closed / proprietary / half-assed one. If there are issues with ActivityPub, as I'm sure there are, then the correct approach would be submit draft proposals to W3C to rectify those issues that everyone could avail of.
Re:But not ActivityPub native (Score:4, Informative)
It's literally on Github [github.com] and has been for years, while the original design was done in the Matrix Room, which was open to all, wherein hundreds of people took part, with a core of about 50 people. It's design process was VASTLY more open than that of ActivityPub.
For God's sake people, stop just making up shit about Bluesky and actually learn the first thing about it before commenting.
The federation? (Score:2)
Can the Romulans still join?
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I dunno, there's some very strict policies about accurate reporting of light counts.
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That would be the Cardassians.
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*(Trods forward to the desk with a downcast expression and hands in her nerd card)*
Sooo... (Score:2)
So that means Bluesky and Mastodon interoperate, right? Right? That would be federation.