There are several models for decentralized code collaboration platforms, ranging from ActivityPub’s (Forgejo) federated model, to Radicle’s entirely P2P model.
I didn’t understand this. As far as I’m aware, Forgejo has no relationship with ActivityPub.
I thought maybe they meant that ActivityPub’s development happens on a Forgejo server, but the ActivityPub spec points to Github as the official repo.
This is cool! How are you implementing issues and such? IIRC, Radicle is using some lesser-known GitHub features to store them in the repo in a transparent way. Or are you using ATProto itself for such things?
Furthermore, while Nix is available on MacOS, using it would be fighting the platform.
Huh, not sure that’s been my experience. I use both NixOS and nix-darwin and I’ll say Nix has been the saving grace in macOS package management. It’s been such a breeze (once you get over the initial setup) to maintain a single tree for configuring my NixOS boxes and my M1 Pro—with a few “if Linux” checks here and there.
Speaking of layouts, I haven’t yet figured out how to use my layout, workman, on the login screen after reboot.
I use Nix as a package manager on macOS and I don’t think I’ve experienced any macOS-specific friction.* But part of that is that I only manage “the Unix side” of the OS with Nix. I don’t use Nix to install GUI apps, and I don’t use home-manager or nix-darwin or any tool that tries to apply some kind of declarative configuration to the whole machine. With this caveat, I can say that Nix has worked just fine for me on macOS.
* I have of course experienced the tremendous amount of friction that always comes with Nix, but as the article says, it’s the best such tool we have right now :-)
I think once you factor in the relay, the answer is clearly no, unless you are running a splinter network. Which makes this article feel a bit disingenuous to me.
i get it. i did try to carve that out as a caveat right at the top and make it clear that this was only addressing one of the two main cost critiques of atproto. it honestly took a lot of work for me to get it here, and the scope of this post was already a challenge for me to try to make cohesive.
that said i won’t argue but will push back on “clearly”, at least it’s not as obvious to me as it seems to be to you.
Christine’s post is fantastic! It’s linked from my post too, it’s great! I’ll add that it’s worth checking out her work on the Spritely Institute for really cool possible decentralized futures.
To me, it was the best example of circle of trust. It was able to pull in many identity sources and delegate the trust decision to you, per relationship. Then, when that was established, you could do encrypted chat etc. From my perspective, it was working as intended and was unique as a meta-type thing. I hadn’t heard of keyoxide, thx.
i never really saw the value proposition in keybase
IIRC I believe keybase came about after Edward Snowdon was trying to leak documents to journalists via GPG encrypted email. He knew the Twitter handles of the journalists but didn’t know the GPG key fingerprint. He got one journalists to tweet their GPG key fingerprint and he could go from there.
So someone made a good way link your GPG key to twitter.
I’ve been meaning to try this but I’m quite happy with GNOME right now. Is there a way I can run this inside GNOME? Or perhaps I’ll have to try PaperWM.
That keyboard looks like it would get pushed all over the place as you use it. Is there enough friction with the felt (?) pad to prevent that from happening, or are you a very delicate typist? :)
It’s a manual process. I didn’t recognize him because his early links were well-received and he was an active commenter. We previously had a conversation about self-promo so I’m escalating to banning domains for a while.
A previous attempt at a strict rule failed. I’m working on a new one, and the current version of it highlights that he doesn’t comment outside of his own posts, which is turning out to be a very strong signal.
A previous attempt at a strict rule failed. I’m working on a new one, and the current version of it highlights that he doesn’t comment outside of his own posts, which is turning out to be a very strong signal.
That’s a wrong claim.
Here are five examples just from the last month.
tbh, I find merging threads to be really annoying. Replies get mixed up and everything loses context. This post is a response to the previous one—merging the two doesn’t make sense since the replies here vs replies there have different operating contexts.
Agreed. When a new post gets merged into on older one, the implicit message seems to be: “Nothing interesting in the new post worth reading or commenting.” It’s a bummer when I think a follow-up post is actually interesting for new reasons, but it’s already been merged and dismissed by the community.
The purpose of merging is to avoid littering the comments with near-duplicate comments as users who maybe missed the first submission react in almost the same way. I can agree that this particular case might be borderline. But the original submission has been hidden by 7 users, which is quite high from my estimation. Assuming that merging a submission also carries over the hidden status, merging the stories preserves their preferences.
the implementation is not ideal, yes. If people would properly post replies as comments in the original thread, then at least the sub-discussion would end up grouped under that comment - something that the merge feature might maybe should try replicate.
It isn’t peer-to-peer, and isn’t designed to run entirely on phones or Raspberry Pis.
Which reminds me of
If it’s inaccessible to the poor it’s neither radical nor revolutionary
— Jonathan Herrera
Part of the original critique is that in not being able to self-host it due to costs, you get only powerful, centralized nodes that are at best if lucky ran by a non-profit or at worst just owned by a VC-funded operation using open washing to garner favor with developers & privacy advocates. Technically the code is available, but it isn’t meant no be ran by you… & if you could, you physically could, you could not afford or sustain it.
They are right to say there is a difference in philosophy here, but I would side with the whole network being about to be ran as a single user on a single node in a bedroom being better for censorship & freedom with the ability to block, defederate, or post whatever at your will without a some corporate gatekeeper or expensive server as a barrier—likewise folks are free to kick you out of their federation instead of the platform saying there aren’t in rules against some particular problematic speech or changing the viewing algorithm since your Super Bowl tweet got less likes than the US president.
It isn’t peer-to-peer, and isn’t designed to run entirely on phones or Raspberry Pis.
The operative word being “entirely”. Your PDS can very well run on super light hardware (there’s someone running it on a Kindle!).
They are right to say there is a difference in philosophy here, but I would side with the whole network being about to be ran as a single user on a single node […]
My only issue with this (having run a single-user honk instance for several years), is how monumentally hard it is to get your tiny instance to federate with the wider fedi. If you want the best experience, your best bet is to get an account on a larger Mastodon instance—and those aren’t running on good vibes only, it costs hella money and is usually supported by volunteers paying out of pocket. So… your quote.
likewise folks are free to kick you out of their federation instead of the platform saying there aren’t in rules against some particular problematic speech or changing the viewing algorithm since your Super Bowl tweet got less likes than the US president.
This isn’t going to happen on Bluesky because the “viewing algorithm” isn’t something you’re locked in to. You can subscribe to feeds of all kinds.
Bottom line is, there’s always tradeoffs. Bluesky traded off full self-hosting (there are efforts to enable this too, by the way) in favour of user experience. Mastodon/AP/etc. traded off user experience in favour of self-hostability.
how monumentally hard it is to get your tiny [honk] instance to federate with the wider fedi
Isn’t that more down to honk being its own special opinionated self though? I have fewer problems federating my GotoSocial instance (but still not zero because that is also opinionated) than I do with my Honk (and almost no problems with my Akkoma instance.)
I guess I was coming at it more from an “exposure” to the wider network problem. A server with many users will federate further than one with a single user.
It doesn’t matter though. If I join a server no matter its size and my account only has ten followers, my toots won’t federate any further than my ten followers’ servers.
I suppose that depends on your flawed definition (which is as wrong as my flawed definition) because my bubble migrated to the fediverse just fine, I’d say 80% the same people.
Granted that the author steers clear of more in-depth technical explanation, but it’s unclear to me how an ActivityPub server that supposedly owns your data is different from a PDS except in the name. You as a user still have to either:
host your own
trust someone else to host it for you
As far as I know it’s entirely possible to run a small ActivityPub server for one user and then they’re virtually identical. What am I missing?
Yes, some essential details are missed in the comparison in the post. Importantly:
using a third-party hosted PDS isn’t 1:1 with using someone else’s AP server, simply because you are not beholden to the server owner(s) moderation/(de)federation choices. You can make your own (subscribing to your own labeller services.
further, your data on the PDS is signed against your DID, which means your account/identity can move across servers with relative ease (and this works, it’s not theoretical, I did it in 15 mins).
So choosing a third-party PDS doesn’t have the same consequences as choosing a Mastodon server. You aren’t forced to create an account elsewhere should you need to migrate. As Dan Abramov puts it:
on mastodon, choosing a server is like choosing where to build a house. on bluesky, choosing a server is like choosing an internet provider.
With all due respect but Mastodon is not the entire ActivityPub federated network. The choices that its developers made are not due to the protocol, but to the fact that Mastodon had a very well defined use case it worked towards, and only then it retrofitted that use to go through ActivityPub.
On a spec compliant ActivityPub server I would expect no obstacles in front of an Activity that comes from an “undesirable” server and is sent to me directly, just like SMTP delivers the SPAM message (outside specific compliance reasons) to my inbox even if it infers I don’t want it.
Also I suspect that a custom PDS software can be built to disallow incoming data from specific DIDs, domains, etc. So I’m pretty sure that they are theoretically equivalent in this respect.
The only point where ATProto might be ahead is in the facility of user move, but I have my reservations even there because in ActivityPub, even though the user identifier is a URL, every one of them also has a public key that can be used as an identifying unique “identity” in the case of changing that URL. Nobody does that because relying on cryptographic keys for identity diminishes the strengths of said cryptography (eg, you’re unable to rotate those keys) and is, IMHO, ill advised.
I have many more things to say about how “awkshwally” the two protocols are way more similar than the AT Protocol creators want to imply, but I haven’t researched the matter enough to be absolutely certain of it, so I’ll leave matters here. :)
The web has many independent websites, and indexers such as Google aggregate the websites and present it back to users in their own ‘view’.
Is it just me or is using Google as an example of a success story for how the open web can avoid being dominated by one company end up making the exact opposite point it seems to intend to make?
It was merely used as an example for a service that aggregates websites—one that most would understand. Where did you pick up the “Google as an example of a success story […]” bit?
If my goal was to assuage fears about how one company with a lot of leverage is totally not a lock-in threat, I would probably not use an example of the most famous monopolist on the web that has spent years abusing its monopolist position to hold the web back by keeping 3rd-party cookies alive, trying to kill ublock origin, etc.
Turns out having good intentions and a “don’t be evil” motto doesn’t actually help in the long run.
If my goal was to assuage fears about how one company with a lot of leverage is totally not a lock-in threat […]
You and I both know that wasn’t what the article was stating. The usage of “Google” there could’ve easily been swapped with DuckDuckGo/Kagi/what-have-you and the point would remain.
No, I honestly don’t know what you mean. The article is implying that Bluesky’s claims about data independence should be taken seriously despite its inherent problems with lock-in and potential for abuse.
Judging from how hard you’ve had to work to justify your initial claim that Google was held up as a “success story” of the open web, I don’t know that there’s any example or framing the author could have used that wouldn’t have been twisted by determined-enough critics.
Has Bluesky actually progressed beyond decentralization in name only, or is it still just the one provider? If Bluesky the company shut their doors tomorrow, would the network survive?
I don’t know (or, to be honest, care that much) about the relative merits of bluesky’s protocol vs ActivityPub, but I am suspicious of the lack of actual federation occurring with bluesky. Mastodon isn’t perfect, but it exists and is actually decentralised in practice, not just on paper.
Not sure why this old meme is back again, when Bluesky has clearly progressed far enough now and you can host your own PDS with relative ease (for the Lobsters demographic).
It’s possible I’ve missed something but the PDS seems like the least interesting part. To get a coherent view of the network, all relevant PDSes need to be pushing to and the AppView need to be reading from the same relay (or set of relays). I am dubious that this is going to be tidy when groups start fragmenting into their own relays, particularly when the experience for the mainstream is that “it just works because I use the official ones so y’all could just stop trying to do something weird”.
This is my understanding as well; running your own PDS is viable but doesn’t really give you much benefit because everyone who will find your stuff will be doing so thru the centralized index run by an organization that is accountable to no one.
You can host your own PDS with ease; how does one use a PDS to communicate with another Bluesky user, without Bluesky-the-company being involved? My understanding is that it involves spinning up quite a lot of other stuff, and asking that other user to reconfigure their setup.
Just spun up a PDS for myself today! I’m feeling optimistic about Bluesky. I feel like it will be decent assuming there’s a committed effort among people to run servers and get some friends on them.
All the components are far enough along that the network would probably survive in some form. It has too many good ideas built into it for no one to run with it. There are already independent PDSes, experiments in running relays, and it just came out how easy it is to run the actual Bluesky web app: https://bsky.app/profile/joelhooks.com/post/3l7syfl7xqk2g
Some of the better perks of the system are still theoretical. It should end up good but it could also all go horribly wrong in some exciting way people write papers about for generations. I don’t know that I’ve seen any third-party PDSes that let other people use them.
Right now a lot operates on confidence in the people building it, the way the company is structured (the same structure that let it escape Twitter), and the fact that they keep delivering on the things they say they want to deliver on. That buys a lot of trust these days, but not everyone accepts the currency.
alternative AppViews providing a microblogging experience do not exist right now (because they … honestly don’t really need to at the moment) – but the PDS stats (i.e. where the data lives) are “37 hosted by Bluesky, 927 hosted by third-parties (of which 263 are offline)”
and since Bluesky has 13 million users you can assume that each bsky PDS has about 350k account repos stored on it but the self-hosted ones probably only have one or two each
Someone would have to set up a new one, and all the people who set a domain would have to update a TXT record. Everyone else would be lost in the drift.
One thing the devs talk about is moving the directory to an independent organization. It would have to be carefully set up to try and avoid the issues of DNS without creating new and worse problems. Right now using or building around Bluesky and AT is a bet on their intentions beating whatever brain worms seem to afflict companies after a while. It’s a race and the brain worms might win.
They acknowledge it and seem self-aware about the risks:
FWIW the Bluesky team agrees. Hopefully not in 5 years (I’d like at least 10 good years) but everybody knows the cycle. The company is a future adversary.
Also the fact that a lot of the math theorem names are hella Euro/West-centric and equal naming credit is never given to theorems that originated from Arabia or Asia.
I’ve switched to Zed + GitHub Copilot for most of my serious programming and I have only good things to say. LLMs/AI are a net positive and make programming way way faster for me. I write a lot of K8s code and using LLMs to generate some of the tedious structs etc. is very convenient.
Will this break if bluesky goes down?
we depend on bluesky-run firehose to propagate events, so yes.
i do hope to see more relay implementations, i do know there are a couple in the works.
adding to what op said, we’re also exploring running our own PDS to allow users to create accounts without having to use bluesky.
I didn’t understand this. As far as I’m aware, Forgejo has no relationship with ActivityPub.
I thought maybe they meant that ActivityPub’s development happens on a Forgejo server, but the ActivityPub spec points to Github as the official repo.
i think they are referencing forgefed (https://forgefed.org/) but the last time i looked forgejo was still working on their implementation of it.
That was my bad! I will amend that to say Forgefed.
https://forgefed.org/
This is cool! How are you implementing issues and such? IIRC, Radicle is using some lesser-known GitHub features to store them in the repo in a transparent way. Or are you using ATProto itself for such things?
Thanks! We’re indeed using atproto for this. For example: https://pdsls.dev/at://did:plc:44ybard66vv44zksje25o7dz/sh.tangled.repo.issue/3ljgdwiejtk22
Is there a link where I can read about Radicle’s use of git (Github?) plumbing? Sounds interesting.
edit: found it - https://radicle.xyz/guides/protocol#collaborative-objects
yup! issues are stored on PDSs, here is a sample issue record, for example.
we want all social bits to be stored “on protocol”.
Radicle uses lesser-known Git features, not GitHub features
Oops! I blame autocorrect. Yeah.
Building Tangled with @op—a social git collaboration platform built on atproto, that’s designed to be decentralised since day one!
Also, quit my job (today was my last day) to work on startups (exploring various ideas) for the next three months. Excited to see where I end up.
What are your other startups?
Huh, not sure that’s been my experience. I use both NixOS and nix-darwin and I’ll say Nix has been the saving grace in macOS package management. It’s been such a breeze (once you get over the initial setup) to maintain a single tree for configuring my NixOS boxes and my M1 Pro—with a few “if Linux” checks here and there.
Same layout, same problem. :D
I use Nix as a package manager on macOS and I don’t think I’ve experienced any macOS-specific friction.* But part of that is that I only manage “the Unix side” of the OS with Nix. I don’t use Nix to install GUI apps, and I don’t use home-manager or nix-darwin or any tool that tries to apply some kind of declarative configuration to the whole machine. With this caveat, I can say that Nix has worked just fine for me on macOS.
* I have of course experienced the tremendous amount of friction that always comes with Nix, but as the article says, it’s the best such tool we have right now :-)
I think once you factor in the relay, the answer is clearly no, unless you are running a splinter network. Which makes this article feel a bit disingenuous to me.
Related: https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
i get it. i did try to carve that out as a caveat right at the top and make it clear that this was only addressing one of the two main cost critiques of atproto. it honestly took a lot of work for me to get it here, and the scope of this post was already a challenge for me to try to make cohesive.
that said i won’t argue but will push back on “clearly”, at least it’s not as obvious to me as it seems to be to you.
Christine’s post is fantastic! It’s linked from my post too, it’s great! I’ll add that it’s worth checking out her work on the Spritely Institute for really cool possible decentralized futures.
You can run Jetstream however, which is a lot lighter: https://bsky.bad-example.com/consuming-the-firehose-cheaply/
Jetstream isn’t a relay replacement - it exists downstream of an existing relay.
A keybase rewrite
there’s keyoxide.io that appears to do similar things but to be honest, i never really saw the value proposition in keybase
To me, it was the best example of circle of trust. It was able to pull in many identity sources and delegate the trust decision to you, per relationship. Then, when that was established, you could do encrypted chat etc. From my perspective, it was working as intended and was unique as a meta-type thing. I hadn’t heard of keyoxide, thx.
Oops, it’s keyoxide.org apparently!
IIRC I believe keybase came about after Edward Snowdon was trying to leak documents to journalists via GPG encrypted email. He knew the Twitter handles of the journalists but didn’t know the GPG key fingerprint. He got one journalists to tweet their GPG key fingerprint and he could go from there.
So someone made a good way link your GPG key to twitter.
I’d highly recommend running your own instance of HashiCorp Vault (or OpenBao), or use 1Password or self-hosted Bitwarden if you’re pedantic.
Why would self-hosting be considered pendantry here?
lol, that’s what I get for being loose with punctuation. I meant self-host if you’re pedantic about using 1Pass.
I’ve been meaning to try this but I’m quite happy with GNOME right now. Is there a way I can run this inside GNOME? Or perhaps I’ll have to try PaperWM.
You can run it embedded, which will run niri in it’s own window inside GNOME. It’s a great was to try it out.
https://cdn.icyphox.sh/desk-oct-2024.png
Of note are:
More at: https://anirudh.fi/uses
That keyboard looks like it would get pushed all over the place as you use it. Is there enough friction with the felt (?) pad to prevent that from happening, or are you a very delicate typist? :)
Yeah there’s hella friction because I’ve got felt pads stuck underneath the boards. Felt against felt is pretty immovable. :^)
A bit of a meta comment: I’m really confused with how self-promo bans are enforced. This account should obviously qualify—what gives?
It’s a manual process. I didn’t recognize him because his early links were well-received and he was an active commenter. We previously had a conversation about self-promo so I’m escalating to banning domains for a while.
A previous attempt at a strict rule failed. I’m working on a new one, and the current version of it highlights that he doesn’t comment outside of his own posts, which is turning out to be a very strong signal.
That’s a wrong claim. Here are five examples just from the last month.
please post responses in the corresponding thread, not separately
@pushcx: can be merged into https://lobste.rs/s/zmnr01/how_decentralized_is_bluesky_really
tbh, I find merging threads to be really annoying. Replies get mixed up and everything loses context. This post is a response to the previous one—merging the two doesn’t make sense since the replies here vs replies there have different operating contexts.
Agreed. When a new post gets merged into on older one, the implicit message seems to be: “Nothing interesting in the new post worth reading or commenting.” It’s a bummer when I think a follow-up post is actually interesting for new reasons, but it’s already been merged and dismissed by the community.
The purpose of merging is to avoid littering the comments with near-duplicate comments as users who maybe missed the first submission react in almost the same way. I can agree that this particular case might be borderline. But the original submission has been hidden by 7 users, which is quite high from my estimation. Assuming that merging a submission also carries over the hidden status, merging the stories preserves their preferences.
Sadly hiding is broken for merged discussions.
the implementation is not ideal, yes. If people would properly post replies as comments in the original thread, then at least the sub-discussion would end up grouped under that comment - something that the merge feature might maybe should try replicate.
Which reminds me of
Part of the original critique is that in not being able to self-host it due to costs, you get only powerful, centralized nodes that are at best if lucky ran by a non-profit or at worst just owned by a VC-funded operation using open washing to garner favor with developers & privacy advocates. Technically the code is available, but it isn’t meant no be ran by you… & if you could, you physically could, you could not afford or sustain it.
They are right to say there is a difference in philosophy here, but I would side with the whole network being about to be ran as a single user on a single node in a bedroom being better for censorship & freedom with the ability to block, defederate, or post whatever at your will without a some corporate gatekeeper or expensive server as a barrier—likewise folks are free to kick you out of their federation instead of the platform saying there aren’t in rules against some particular problematic speech or changing the viewing algorithm since your Super Bowl tweet got less likes than the US president.
The operative word being “entirely”. Your PDS can very well run on super light hardware (there’s someone running it on a Kindle!).
My only issue with this (having run a single-user honk instance for several years), is how monumentally hard it is to get your tiny instance to federate with the wider fedi. If you want the best experience, your best bet is to get an account on a larger Mastodon instance—and those aren’t running on good vibes only, it costs hella money and is usually supported by volunteers paying out of pocket. So… your quote.
This isn’t going to happen on Bluesky because the “viewing algorithm” isn’t something you’re locked in to. You can subscribe to feeds of all kinds.
Bottom line is, there’s always tradeoffs. Bluesky traded off full self-hosting (there are efforts to enable this too, by the way) in favour of user experience. Mastodon/AP/etc. traded off user experience in favour of self-hostability.
Isn’t that more down to honk being its own special opinionated self though? I have fewer problems federating my GotoSocial instance (but still not zero because that is also opinionated) than I do with my Honk (and almost no problems with my Akkoma instance.)
I guess I was coming at it more from an “exposure” to the wider network problem. A server with many users will federate further than one with a single user.
It doesn’t matter though. If I join a server no matter its size and my account only has ten followers, my toots won’t federate any further than my ten followers’ servers.
I’m so glad Bluesky et al attracts the more politically active members out from Twitter, so I can read about tech in peace
It’s not attracting the nazis from Twitter, though, who are the ones who have been making Twitter more and more terrible lately.
That’s funny considering most of tech Twitter is on Bluesky now.
I suppose that depends on your flawed definition (which is as wrong as my flawed definition) because my bubble migrated to the fediverse just fine, I’d say 80% the same people.
Granted that the author steers clear of more in-depth technical explanation, but it’s unclear to me how an ActivityPub server that supposedly owns your data is different from a PDS except in the name. You as a user still have to either:
As far as I know it’s entirely possible to run a small ActivityPub server for one user and then they’re virtually identical. What am I missing?
Yes, some essential details are missed in the comparison in the post. Importantly:
So choosing a third-party PDS doesn’t have the same consequences as choosing a Mastodon server. You aren’t forced to create an account elsewhere should you need to migrate. As Dan Abramov puts it:
With all due respect but Mastodon is not the entire ActivityPub federated network. The choices that its developers made are not due to the protocol, but to the fact that Mastodon had a very well defined use case it worked towards, and only then it retrofitted that use to go through ActivityPub.
On a spec compliant ActivityPub server I would expect no obstacles in front of an Activity that comes from an “undesirable” server and is sent to me directly, just like SMTP delivers the SPAM message (outside specific compliance reasons) to my inbox even if it infers I don’t want it.
Also I suspect that a custom PDS software can be built to disallow incoming data from specific DIDs, domains, etc. So I’m pretty sure that they are theoretically equivalent in this respect.
The only point where ATProto might be ahead is in the facility of user move, but I have my reservations even there because in ActivityPub, even though the user identifier is a URL, every one of them also has a public key that can be used as an identifying unique “identity” in the case of changing that URL. Nobody does that because relying on cryptographic keys for identity diminishes the strengths of said cryptography (eg, you’re unable to rotate those keys) and is, IMHO, ill advised.
I have many more things to say about how “awkshwally” the two protocols are way more similar than the AT Protocol creators want to imply, but I haven’t researched the matter enough to be absolutely certain of it, so I’ll leave matters here. :)
Is it just me or is using Google as an example of a success story for how the open web can avoid being dominated by one company end up making the exact opposite point it seems to intend to make?
It was merely used as an example for a service that aggregates websites—one that most would understand. Where did you pick up the “Google as an example of a success story […]” bit?
If my goal was to assuage fears about how one company with a lot of leverage is totally not a lock-in threat, I would probably not use an example of the most famous monopolist on the web that has spent years abusing its monopolist position to hold the web back by keeping 3rd-party cookies alive, trying to kill ublock origin, etc.
Turns out having good intentions and a “don’t be evil” motto doesn’t actually help in the long run.
You and I both know that wasn’t what the article was stating. The usage of “Google” there could’ve easily been swapped with DuckDuckGo/Kagi/what-have-you and the point would remain.
No, I honestly don’t know what you mean. The article is implying that Bluesky’s claims about data independence should be taken seriously despite its inherent problems with lock-in and potential for abuse.
We’ve all seen this play out before.
OK, perhaps I misunderstood your original comment. I will elect to stop here. :)
Judging from how hard you’ve had to work to justify your initial claim that Google was held up as a “success story” of the open web, I don’t know that there’s any example or framing the author could have used that wouldn’t have been twisted by determined-enough critics.
Has Bluesky actually progressed beyond decentralization in name only, or is it still just the one provider? If Bluesky the company shut their doors tomorrow, would the network survive?
I don’t know (or, to be honest, care that much) about the relative merits of bluesky’s protocol vs ActivityPub, but I am suspicious of the lack of actual federation occurring with bluesky. Mastodon isn’t perfect, but it exists and is actually decentralised in practice, not just on paper.
Not sure why this old meme is back again, when Bluesky has clearly progressed far enough now and you can host your own PDS with relative ease (for the Lobsters demographic).
It’s possible I’ve missed something but the PDS seems like the least interesting part. To get a coherent view of the network, all relevant PDSes need to be pushing to and the AppView need to be reading from the same relay (or set of relays). I am dubious that this is going to be tidy when groups start fragmenting into their own relays, particularly when the experience for the mainstream is that “it just works because I use the official ones so y’all could just stop trying to do something weird”.
This is my understanding as well; running your own PDS is viable but doesn’t really give you much benefit because everyone who will find your stuff will be doing so thru the centralized index run by an organization that is accountable to no one.
You can host your own PDS with ease; how does one use a PDS to communicate with another Bluesky user, without Bluesky-the-company being involved? My understanding is that it involves spinning up quite a lot of other stuff, and asking that other user to reconfigure their setup.
Just spun up a PDS for myself today! I’m feeling optimistic about Bluesky. I feel like it will be decent assuming there’s a committed effort among people to run servers and get some friends on them.
All the components are far enough along that the network would probably survive in some form. It has too many good ideas built into it for no one to run with it. There are already independent PDSes, experiments in running relays, and it just came out how easy it is to run the actual Bluesky web app: https://bsky.app/profile/joelhooks.com/post/3l7syfl7xqk2g
How many 3rd-party hosts exist right now? Let’s assume I don’t want to run it myself. How do I find them?
Some of the better perks of the system are still theoretical. It should end up good but it could also all go horribly wrong in some exciting way people write papers about for generations. I don’t know that I’ve seen any third-party PDSes that let other people use them.
Right now a lot operates on confidence in the people building it, the way the company is structured (the same structure that let it escape Twitter), and the fact that they keep delivering on the things they say they want to deliver on. That buys a lot of trust these days, but not everyone accepts the currency.
They’ve put out a paper that covers a lot of their thinking and plans.
alternative AppViews providing a microblogging experience do not exist right now (because they … honestly don’t really need to at the moment) – but the PDS stats (i.e. where the data lives) are “37 hosted by Bluesky, 927 hosted by third-parties (of which 263 are offline)”
and since Bluesky has 13 million users you can assume that each bsky PDS has about 350k account repos stored on it but the self-hosted ones probably only have one or two each
What would happen if plc.directory disappeared tomorrow?
Someone would have to set up a new one, and all the people who set a domain would have to update a TXT record. Everyone else would be lost in the drift.
That’s one thing I tried to address with this: https://lobste.rs/s/84tpv1/nobody_cares_about_decentralization#c_j5naod
One thing the devs talk about is moving the directory to an independent organization. It would have to be carefully set up to try and avoid the issues of DNS without creating new and worse problems. Right now using or building around Bluesky and AT is a bet on their intentions beating whatever brain worms seem to afflict companies after a while. It’s a race and the brain worms might win.
They acknowledge it and seem self-aware about the risks:
But that might not be enough.
Nice! If you use Orion, you can “Copy link to selection” (right click menu).
Looks like Vivaldi also has “Copy link to highlight” that does the same thing, didn’t know it existed in the context menu.
Also the fact that a lot of the math theorem names are hella Euro/West-centric and equal naming credit is never given to theorems that originated from Arabia or Asia.
I’ve switched to Zed + GitHub Copilot for most of my serious programming and I have only good things to say. LLMs/AI are a net positive and make programming way way faster for me. I write a lot of K8s code and using LLMs to generate some of the tedious structs etc. is very convenient.