Fediverse

Not a bad take on BlueSky. The other funny side of it is that many of the users there don’t want any federation to happen at all.

It’s not unreasonable though that they have wanted to make sure their system of federation etc works well before they open it up, and that that has taken some time. By all accounts they have a small team and are generally making slow progress, and if they see themselves as competing with Twitter, they probably think it needs to work well straight out of the gate.

So, again, I’ve got an impressionistic understanding.

The big central server, AFAIU, can be decentralised. How multiple such servers share data with each other, I don’t know. But, AFAIU, policy choices can be made at the level of the big central servers about what content or users they allow etc. But the idea is that moderation decisions will be made by downstream services. And the expectation of course is that the cost of running such a server would be prohibitively onerous except for a few instances. So it’d be a soft form, oligopoly like, of decentralisation you might say, if anyone actually makes one (currently there’s only the BlueSky big central server). It’s an interesting question though how small a community would be necessary to collect the wherewithal to start a new one.

Otherwise, the idea, AFAICT, is that it’s just a service and not intended to affect content and users much, which is instead up to all the downstream services which are intended to make up the actual user experience. The idea is that these layers will be open and decentralised. AFAIU, BlueSky is technically already decentralised now, under the hood, as to test things they’ve split the platform over multiple instances. I’m pretty sure their equivalent of an instance is something anyone can run (where BlueSky the app is open source). So it’s some form of decentralisation I suppose. I haven’t seen any breakdown though as to what community building facilities, tools and powers are available from the system. That’d be interesting, especially in comparison to the fediverse. I've seen it predicted that as BlueSky opens up there'll be a migration of some sort to the fediverse as vulnerable users begin to suffer from abuse that the fediverse offers more protection from. But BlueSky is also a moving target.

I suspect the big eagle eye perspective is that the fediverse leans more "balkanised and independent servers" and BlueSky (or at least the promise/idea of bluesky) leans more "distributed public square". In the push away from mega social media platforms, I think there's probably a need for both to exist, at least in the interim as this whole "transition", which is likely more lengthy and chaotic than many would like, pans out.

In the end though, bluesky feels like a more fragile project. They're a bit "late to the game", clearly have only a small team working on it, without a particularly compelling platform, and a little like the fediverse, have a slowly/slightly slipping away user base at the moment. There's a real chance we won't be talking about it in 2 years time. It could also do really well and suck the oxygen out of the fediverse in the same time TBH. In reality ... this whole thing may just take a while to shake out.

Heya! Good answers earlier by you!

Yeah I think I'll have to get into that, but I'm starting to run into the limit of not being a programmer myself, and information is pretty scarce on ATproto. The article differs from their own federation architecture description from earlier in the year, simply because its outdated and noone has formally written down the new info, so that was a bit of a struggle haha https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/5-5-2023-federation-architecture

At any rate, the PDS's are amenable for sure. Robin Berjon is the furthest along with thinking here, with his AP over AT piece: https://berjon.com/ap-at/ Responses I've seen havent suggested its technically impossible, but probably difficult for reasons that I tuned out of reading because I didnt understand :D

Beyond that, people keep talking about the lexicon and how that at is core is also versatile; similar to how fedi has Mastodon's type=Note that everyone uses, even though you can create any 'type' you want. I'm pretty sure that nobody has done that yet tho.

Oh thats an interesting question! I'm assuming you are talking about the UX/UI of instance selection?

And thats not something I have written about (neither does another article pop into my mind either sadly), but interesting idea for an article for sure to write about

At this point BlueSky had better make free liquor and hot BBQ come out of your computer if they want people to adopt it. I could be wrong, it could be real attractive, but I feel like there's so much momentum built around ActivityPub that they're by now fated to abandon AT for ActivityPub whether they want to or not, or else go the way of CompuServe.

I'm working on a client/app called Agora that integrates bridges like bridgy-fed so that you don't have to think about those quirks, you just search something like "aoc.bsky.social" on it while logged in to a Mastodon account, it'll automatically pull up the bridged version of the account for you to follow.

https://agorasocial.app