this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2024
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Bluesky is federated?
Not really: https://lemmy.world/post/19531540
Tbf a lot of the arguments against their federation capabilities here is that they make it hard to access, which is a much smarter decision from a user experience perspective. Majority of the general public has absolutely zero idea wtf federation and instances means and that's okay, they just need a quick way to sign up and get using the platform.
Considering you can host your own PDS and Relay I would consider that close enough to federation that it should be included in fediverse discussions and shouldn't splinter.
The big architectural difference is instead of AP federation with each instance it's just one massive firehouse on the protocol (federation with all default) which absolutely has its benefits compared to ActivityPub.
The fact that there is still to this date no alternative Bluesky server that can be used to register seems to indicate that they put the entry cost to federation too high.
If the federation is only theoretical and never happens in reality, it's not really federated.
This is true, but why would someone go out of their way to do this when all data ends up in the same firehose?
Three circumstances:
Domain name federation: Currently live and implemented across the site, in fact I've done this.
PDS (personal data) federation: You would ideally only host your own PDS to host your own data.
Backup: You want to host a backup of all Firehose data for access by others (very valid case, but you're paying to just host data that's already available)
Any other circumstance it's going to cost the host money for effectively no usecase. Sure people can do it but why would the host pay hosting fees? If Bluesky went down a path of introducing advertisements or became a pile of shit then there's true incentive to host your own independent PDS/Relay/App View. I generally think people just aren't understanding federation across Bluesky because it truly is a lot more complicated complicated than ActivityPub (some pros / some cons).
Fediverse admins pay fees for their instances. BlueSky requiring such high fees to run your own instance seems just a hidden way to prevent people from actually creating federated instances.
So if tomorrow Elon Musk buys BlueSky, the only alternative for people to keep using the AT Protocol and stay federated with BlueSky without being under Musk's control would be to be running that very expensive relay?
Yes but they have communities within their instance. With ATProto everything is published to the protocol so there's no inherent internal community, the instance is just the infrastructure at that point, not a community.
Also in terms of expense I've seen it's around $250 / month which equivalent to larger Lemmy instances, I think programming dev was around this price point so it's not absurdly large. But it is at the point of why run this if I'm just hosting infrastructure and not creating a community.
I have been reading that some people are working on subdomain @'s (equivalent to Lemmy username@domain) within ATProto, which leads to more community interaction, but I think that's still handled under the Domain federation not the PDS / Relay federation.
I don't know about prog dev, but Lemmy instances are fairly cheap to run, see this thread https://lemmy.world/post/19466047.
And to give my potential hot take, but I think what Bluesky and the AT protocol does should be called crawling instead of federating. If I understand things correctly, then what AT expects is for a replay to crawl the network looking for relevant data in PDSs, as opposed to APub where you push your data to the relevant places. I know this is semantics, but if we accept the Bluesky definition of federation then Google and Bing are federation services and that just doesn't feel right.
It's more expensive than a Lemmy Instance and with less opportunity to build a community that would help fund it.
Yeah, I'm struggling to see a reason why anyone would run an AT replay and that's probably by design.
Indeed. If you invent your own protocol you would have to make it easy to set-up an instance and there should be a good reason why you'd want to. As it doesn't and there isn't, either some very clever people are very bad at their job or this is the point.
As most Bluesky users don't care (they're just grateful for somewhere like Xitter they can go to) I don't really see much coming of this aspect but, if any regulators pull them up for any issues it is always there as a Get Out of Jail Free card - we can't be anticompetitive because we have federation (swap "anticompetitive" for whatever enshittification shenanigans they come up with further down the line).
Yeah I definitely wouldn't argue against it, throwing my hot take out, I would say we should call all of these platforms decentralized social media instead of tying everything to federated social media, and keep everything under the same umbrella. But obviously crypto has somewhat degraded the word decentralized 😅.
I don't disagree, Nostr, APub and AT are all responses to the centralisation of social media in the 2010s and they all bill themselves as decentralised protocols, so should be discussed together. I'm just less trusting of Bluesky as they're VC backed and the general direction and vibe is very 'tech bro'. The lack of private blocks is endemic of that, private data being a thing that has to added and not considered important from day one. APub, on the other hand, has a very FOSS-esque culture, which is what I love about it and probably why it'll never go mainstream.
Ah, thank you for this. Indeed paying for infrastructure without any real community feeling isn't really attractive.