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.

Once that happens we now wait for the platform that has the most sign ups.

This seems like a major win for Mastodon. Bluesky is clearly spinning this as a positive, however, so what am I missing?

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.

There is no escape...

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.

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.

There are other clients for Bluesky that do the same thing as the bsky.app web app: https://docs.bsky.app/showcase?tags=client

On top of that, user defined moderation will be applied from block and mute lists. Hopefully this will include using 3rd party lists and eventually, user specified content filters.

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.)

I don't understand why so many technical people equate monopoly with success. I use IRC every day.

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.

For clarity: I'd love to see this comment and say "I was wrong" 5 or 10 years later.

I am unsure if I am going to run my own just yet. We'll see.

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.

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.

This feels like "thanks for offloading some of the data, but we still retain most of the useful control?"

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/1207024379549061120/12070503280...

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.

Seems intriguing regardless. Congrats on making it happen!

Thank you! Great to see companies taking feedback seriously.

Can't have anyone competing with you, after all!

It's roughly 10 posts/second, so it's trivial to process it completely locally.

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?

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%.

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!

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? )

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).

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?

Love the fresh federated model btw!

Would it be possible to use it for macroblogging, i.e. long posts with markdown markup, embedded images, etc? If so is there a python library tghat implements atproto?

> 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.

Very cool to see this available though, I might have to try it out later this week!

My question was motivated by the fact that from the outside the AT proto ecosystem looks pretty monocultural, and personally I don't trust that. :)

When I was thinking about rolling my own federated social service (during the whole Twitter / Mastodon shuffle), I started thinking about the negative impacts of federation. “How can I build a kill switch into this thing in case bad actors start to participate?”

Of course, that means a central authority having moderation control.

But then, part of me thought.. does there need to be a kill switch? Do we want centralized moderation control? If laws are being broken, or social issues are being pressed to the fringe (*lons X), then the ISP would intervene. Or… the responsibility of moderation shifts elsewhere than the provider of the software. (To where do moderation responsibilities shift, if anywhere? I think is still a question.)

I personally landed at the spot of: it’s really no different than what the WWW provides — it’s just easier access. But, is that easier access to self host content and media dangerous? (lol I guess I’m still conflicted about what could happen with wider ease-of-access to self hosting.)

… back to sleep. This stuff literally keeps me up at night lol

(I didn’t get to the other comments further down in this post that talk about content moderation .. but I’m seeing them now!)

It's wasteful to get an entire second machine for something that can use the resources available on the machine running Home Assistant OS

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.

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.)

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.

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.

If it had been an opt-in system, the response would probably have been far different.

As opposed to centralized moderation (twitter, FB, IG, etc.)

I use Twitter for tech, but my feed is now conservative politics, gore video, & tech tweets intermingled.

In the face of current events though, that can be overlooked as it is not a narrative that serves western interest.

But to give an anecdote about an alternative, I rarely see any bigotry on Mastodon. Instances which allow that or don't moderate it correctly get block listed by instances I like. These instances may defederate into their own bubble in which they can still exist but cause no harm to the general timeline. Yet everyone still remains the freedom to express themselves. I like this because it's just a natural way of how to solve this problem for the end user.

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 [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.

To be clear, custom feeds aren’t defined in the client app. Anyone can run a custom feed on their own server and with arbitrary logic. A custom feed subscribes to a global firehose (which could also be run by a third party) and uses the stream of the events in the network to produce its results. A user can then publish such a feed under their account, and other users can consume it. This is essentially event sourcing.

Here’s a technical paper with details: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.03239.pdf

We’ll have more to share on composable moderation in near future.

Running your own server (aka PDS) allows you to post content that might be blocked on other servers.

The "global" moderation in BlueSky is also federated. Anyone can provide a weighted feed, search engine or other content discovery service (aka AppView) by crawling servers or other indexers (aka Relay). This is like what google/bing/ddg does for webpages.

The user can then apply their own moderation to the results returned by the aggretator/indexer of their choice. This like running an add blocker.

e.g. Call for democracy can be highly illegal in some regions(no, not just in China, or just few countries that are "super backwards"). Some may wish to say that those regions are objectively wrong and deserve no attentions, those who ingest such content should fight to death for that speech, or something heroic along that. It's not that simple and easy, and in those cases a "zero tolerance on criticisms for social systems" filter might be useful in letting user in for what is worthwhile without asking for their lives nor blood on our hands.

btw, if only it was always something that heroic. Mastodon Fediverse exploded and sheared into camps of censored loli, uncensored furry, alt-right terrorism, and myriad rest of none-of-it isolates, all slowly declining. A global unified federated microblogging network that was almost completed, over that.

They also mention that anyone can run another of these, but there is zero chance anyone will be able to do that.

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.

> if you have a hand on the control of the relatively centralized recommendation algorithm?

There's nothing centralized about it. Anyone can run an algorithm. If you don't like that algorithm, drop that feed, and find a new one.

Basically, a big difference between BlueSky and Mastodon is that in BlueSky, almost everything is independent parts you can layer together however you like. Mastodon is based around instances, and so ties a lot of these sorts of choices together for everyone on that instance. On BlueSky, "my instance", that is, where my data is hosted, is separate from the posts that I see, because I can choose to follow whatever feeds I like. My instance is also separate from my personal moderation preferences, which I choose independent of my instance.

The same is true about most so-called "left-wing" journalism. Some journalists may be true believers but the platforms exist to make money, not to be any threat to the systems those ideologies explicitly oppose.

Heck, this even goes for political parties like the Democrats: the Texas governor literally rejected the authority of the federal government and legislative system by deploying his military at the border and the Democrat president's response was to propose a bill that would have created a legal avenue for what the treasonous governor was trying to make happen. Decorum is used as an excuse to keep intentionally ceding ground to the supposed political enemy.

Calling it 'The Problem' like climate change or the national debt gives it too much power. Just use something else. People use group chats for real relationships now anyway.

So in practice you have to make choices, or you'll end up running the new 4chan and being sad about your life. As happened to the guy who ran the old 4chan: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/4chans...

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.)

For a decentralized protocol doing things right is much more important than doing things fast, it is very difficult (and in a lot of cases impossible) to break backwards compatibility.

Videos might be more of a resource issue. Hardly a good time to launch videos almost at the same timeframe as they spike their user base by going public.

I am not sure if it will succeed or fail, but I am interested to see how it plays out.

I'm not sure this follows. There is a similarity to the reddit model of moderation. The host provides some base amount of moderation but supplemental moderation comes from members of the community. In the Bluesky model, a 'subreddit' is analagous to an indexer/aggregator (aka Relay/AppView) that provides a moderated and/or weighted feed of content. The same incentives for volunteer mods on Reddit will exist for volunteer mods on Bluesky.

EU is moving towards requiring all social media obey EU laws, under loose notion that their laws is the least restrictive and most reasonable. No one is, and the sum of all ethical standards on Earth is not going to be something very popular, so that's nonsense. OTOH, it's perfectly reasonable that content served at scale in a region will have to be lawful; "this content you want removed is lawful in MY country" is sort of nonsense too. So moderation decoupling and, ahem, moderation localization is going to be necessary for social media. I suppose that's where they're going.

They better have a good answer to this because it's a threat to the ecosystem as a whole if they don't. Because relying on VC money in this environment is not the smartest thing to do.

This release, of federation, is in my mind a major answer to the real question you're asking, which is the same but with "the employees" instead of "Jack," as they have the equity stake.

Once things are federated, other folks gain power over the protocol, by virtue of usage. If Bluesky PBLLC starts to do shady things, the other instances can refuse to do so, and talk to each other instead.

This is why the split between AT and BlueSky is important, and why this news matters, as it is meaningfully delivering on the desire to protect against such a thing.

I have seen two main complaints:

* This is opt-out not opt-in, and I don't like that.

* BlueSky is bad because it is run by a company (sometimes with a suggestion that Jack Dorsey owns and runs the place), and I think the fediverse should be free from corporate influence, and so I object to the idea of a bridge.

Mastodon is very sensitive to that.

People will still bridge the two in various ways.

People will also bolt on more direct bridging to Mastodon if there's any demand from Bluesky users.

Basically, unless Bluesky totally fails, it will be embraced and extended by the broader broader Fediverse, because why not?

But it's not never. For example, I can see your post. So I can send a screenshot of your post to my friends to dicuss it. I can't see your hard drive contents. So I shouldn't hack into it and send a screenshot of your hard drive to my friends to discuss it.

So technical feasibility influences what is reasonable to do as a society. It's not "feasible = reasonable", or else murder would be reasonable, but it definitely does influence it.

And in this case, I believe what the Fediverse people commenting in the GitHub issue want to be unreasonable. It is unreasonable to publish something publicly, on a federated network, where privacy controls exist (but are not being used), and then claim to have an expectation of privacy in a public space, especially when such bridges provide utility and benefit to others that just can't happen if it's opt-in.

It is reasonable to block it. It is unreasonable to expect everyone else to restrain themselves from using public data in the spirit of the open Internet. It is especially unreasonable to harass non-profit bridge developers in this case. That's not a social solution, just harassment.

Note about copyright: that's not a path one should go down, because it'll make the Fediverse illegal as a whole. It's probably fair use, anyway.

Note about AT protocol: yes it's designed by a for-profit, but it's good. Just because something is for-profit and VC-backed does not mean it will enshittify; take Element for example. It solves a lot of issues that people were having with Mastodon such as global full text search and a global feed. I would use it if it only had more relays to spread out the control.

In general, "I want my stuff on Bluesky but don't want to deal with cross-posting to multiple different platforms and keeping up with responses on all of them"

And, "I want my stuff on whatever platform people want to read it on without having to individually approve each one" (which is quite literally the entire point of public posts on Mastodon).

OH - and it wasn't the bridge creator's decision anyway; it was the decision of people on Bluesky to follow you that would trigger your posts to be federated, so...

How about "If I wanted my stuff on the your Mastodon server, I would have put it there"?

"If I wanted my Mastodon content on your RSS feed, I would have put it there".

How about "If I wanted my stuff on the Internet, a publicly available internet, I would have put it there".

This tribalism around network/brands/protocols is beyond stupid. The thing that is killing Twitter is its closedness and the assumption that the means of communication is what matters. It's not. Let open protocols be open.

If people want privacy, then they should use a secure communication protocol and not a social media network.

I thought that was the point of activitypub.

exactly like they did with usenet without any issue?

The whole point of a fediverse is it's a federation. Therefore there is implied consent to copying from one instance to another.

> but the intent of posting to Mastodon isn't to have it show up automatically on another network

Mastodon isn't a network, the network is the fediverse. Mastodon is some software that runs on the network.

Mastodon is an odd sort of network, there's more blocking than I expected and it somehow seems as if blocking is an intrinsic part of the design. In Mastodon, blocking looks like a choice one makes for whatever reasons, not an unloved measure needed for fighting abuse.

As if the design doesn't tell users "you can follow people in the fediverse" but rather "your ability to follow people in the fediverse is limited by you and three other parties and the software isn't among the three".

So… if the mastodonish idea of consent doesn't extend to all of the fediverse, what makes bluesky different from some unvetted mastodon site run by weird people? If the poster's/follower's/would-be follower's consent isn't taken for granted in one case and isn't taken for granted in the other, what makes the two cases different? There obviously is a technical difference, but what is the difference wrt. consent?

Except that's not what the bridge does, at all. It only follows you on someone's behalf when someone on Bluesky specifically requests to follow you through the bridge.

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.

Bluesky doesn't have the ability to do this. There's no API key to revoke that could stop someone else from running parallel apps/infrastructure/etc. The network is completely open.

That this moderation strategy would prevent the use of all slurs (even reappropriated ones) sounds like a feature to me, not a bug.