7 ms·
Bluesky's AT Protocol - Federation Architecture Overview
- mserdarsanli 3y agoThey are trying to build a decentralized and open social protocol and one of the first things they have done is removing scrollbar from their pages for no reason at all. They are definitely on the right track.
- gumby 3y agoDisappointing that it’s not a true Hays-style AT protocol. That would have made writing clients much easier,
- DoItToMe81 3y agoBGS seems like a very costly and unnecessary system designed to keep functional centralization and central info control. Whatever interest I had in this is gone.
- esjeon 3y agoI think the federation part of this post is kinda ill-written. BGS is more of a proxy for messages in PDS, and not critical for federation itself. It's something additional to the federation network, but still necessary to build a user-friendly application. In other words, it belongs to application layer, which is above the federation layer. I'm pretty sure this is the intent of the design.
- china 3y agoFun to see this pop up here: https://staging.bsky.app/profile/newsycombinator.bsky.social/post/3juz76em6sl2w https://staging.bsky.app/profile/newsycombinator.bsky.social...
- tedunangst 3y agoCan't wait for the day bluesky discovers it's possible to render content for visitors who aren't logged in.
- wesleytodd 3y agoIt is an invite only beta on a staging domain.
- CodexArcana 3y agoShhh we are supposed to be mad and cynical in this thread.
- capableweb 3y agoIn case others are curious, it just looks like this: https://imgur.com/a/ILAK4Ms https://imgur.com/a/ILAK4Ms Not much to it really. And yeah, for sure the only reason people outside of bluesky cannot see the content is because they're still figuring out how to actually serve image bytes over HTTP, which turned out to be a technically difficult problem that there is no prior research about.
- testfrequency 3y ago[flagged]
- goykasi 3y agoIf you dont mind using the console apps, it seems like you are able to query from gosky and slurp all(?) of the data with the bigsky app. Im not sure if that is intended though. I dont even have an account or invite code yet -- just on my local server.
- quaintdev 3y ago> The BGS handles "big-world" networking. It crawls the network, gathering as much data as it can, and outputs it in one big stream for other services to use. It’s analogous to a firehose provider or a super-powered relay node. I think we should abandon whole idea of feed. Instead give me people/account/tag specific feed like Instagram or WhatsApp stories. With this I choose what I want to see. It would drastically reduce noise and my time on platform. The platform should be delight to use not something that is constantly trying to suck me into drama. This would also eliminate need of Big Graph Services.
- timeon 3y agoFeed is usually for accommodating promoted content.
- 12907835202 3y agoGoogle plus circles?
- tedunangst 3y agoThat's how it works without the BGS. You don't have to use it. Follow whoever you want, see their posts. Done.
- verdverm 3y agoCan you also prevent the BGS from scraping your server? What if I don't want to pay the networking bill they would cause? How is the BGS going to pay for sending out the firehose to all the listeners? It's still unclear to me how the federated economics will work out
- capableweb 3y agoSure, why not? Block things based on the user-agent, ala robots.txt
- deadly_syn 3y ago
- ilaksh 3y agoHas anyone done an in-depth comparison between Locutus and Bluesky? https://github.com/freenet/locutus https://github.com/freenet/locutus
- quaintdev 3y agoExamples of what can be built on Locutus include: - Decentralized email (with a gateway to legacy email via the @freenet.org domain) - Decentralized microblogging (think Twitter or Facebook) - Instant Messaging (Whatsapp, Signal) - Online Store (Amazon) - Discussion (Reddit, HN) - Video discovery (Youtube, TikTok) - Search (Google, Bing) Bluesky is just a decentralised social media.
- bovermyer 3y ago...email is already decentralized, though.
- gkbrk 3y agoEmail is federated no? Can't really email you if gmail bans you or goes under, or your domain is taken down somehow. But maybe with a decentralized email it's possible to email pubkeys directly.
- geekodour 3y agogmail email is centralized. hosting your own email server would make it decentralized? I am not sure what makes things "federated".
- gkbrk 3y agoBecause if you host your own email server, the email address has a domain or possibly IP address to point at your server. But getting domains, or getting IP addresses are both centralized. If you gave your email address to someone, you cannot change it on their devices. Your domain registrar with DNS for the domain case, or your ISP for the IP case, can stop email deliveries to you or redirect them somewhere else. With a decentralized email, people email "you". Not "your username" on Google's service, or your username on a domain you rent from others, and not your username on an IP you rent from a centralized authority.
- f38zf5vdt 3y agoI still don't comprehend why Dorsey didn't just try to make the largest ActivityPub server on the web. Instead we get a haphazard rewrite of everything ActivityPub has already solved and a zany "you need an invite to get into this club" airdrop that feels dated to gmail 20 years ago. The service feels too much like "Elon bought Twitter, now we need to make Twitter again". That Dorsey is the principal investor makes it hard to think that it is anything else. The only market it seems to be gaining traction in from my perspective is millennials who have nostalgia for old Twitter -- and as someone who grew up with old Twitter, I can say I don't really miss it.
- lazzlazzlazz 3y ago> I still don't comprehend why Dorsey didn't just try to make the largest ActivityPub server on the web. Because that would just restart at square one? It's like we've learned nothing about centralization since the web1 era.
- capableweb 3y ago> Instead we get a haphazard rewrite of everything ActivityPub has already solved As someone who doesn't seem to be a deep into the specifications (ActivityPub nor AT Protocol) as you are, how does ActivityPub handle people moving across servers without loosing old content and interactions? Like if I use server A but want to move to server B, how does that work in practice? How does server C who used to communicate with server A get notified that they now have to communicate with server B instead? > The service feels too much like "Elon bought Twitter, now we need to make Twitter again" Strange feeling considering bluesky was first announced in 2019 as a Twitter project, eventually spun out as a separate entity in 2021, and Elon didn't start the acquisition of Twitter until 2022 sometime.
- pietervdvn 3y agoThe old server broadcasts a 'this person has moved'-message. Your followers will then automatically switch over to the new account. This implies that: - If the old server is offline or unwilling, you cannot move - Your old toots and interactions will still be tied to the old address, so you leave those behind. There is some talk going on to find ways to mitigate this and it might be possible to fix the second issue. The first issue is a bit trickier though. If you were to remove trust from the server, it becomes way harder to fight spam.
- mastodon_acc 3y agoWho runs the BGS? It’s the most expensive part, a few “centralized” providers will run this? What if BGS injects its own filtering? Honestly this sounds like a more complicated way of implementing centralization
- tedunangst 3y agoEffectively yes. It's roughly a giant follow bot, run by those with the resources to do so. If you don't like its filtering, I guess you'd switch to another more to your liking.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- grishka 3y agoThey are so insistent that most people want the entertainment use case for social media, they informed their protocol architecture design by that. No, no one wants that. Everyone is already sick of centralized social media services forcefully shoving recommended content from unknown people down their throats. They just want a chronological timeline of posts made by people they explicitly followed. No ads, no recommendations (Instagram's "mute recommended content for 30 days" is straight mockery btw), no prompts, no nothing, just updates from people you followed. And that's already solved by ActivityPub. Everything becomes much, much simpler when you don't need some kind of pool of "all posts in the universe" to choose from.
- capableweb 3y ago> forcefully shoving recommended content from unknown people down their throats. They just want a chronological timeline of posts made by people they explicitly followed So... You're saying you like AT Protocol/Bluesky then? Because if that's what you're trying to say, your post kind of reads like you don't like it, but then what you want is exactly what they are trying to provide...
- grishka 3y agoMy understanding from this and earlier blog posts is that they want an algorithmic timeline where people can choose their algorithm. Those "feed generators" are the pluggable algorithms they promised and they do need global indexes (BGS's) to be able to inject out-of-network content to your feed. It all checks out. Yes you can get a chronological feed of accounts you follow, but that seemingly isn't what they see as the most important use case.
- CodexArcana 3y agoOne of those will be chronological. That's still an algorithm...
- sbarre 3y agoThe beauty of this being decentralized and open source is that, in theory, there would be a large number of possible algorithms (including "no algorithm") for users to choose from. There's an earlier blog post that talks about the "algorithm marketplace" that is worth looking up. I don't think this team "sees" any use cases for sorting feeds right now. In the current beta there are two feeds, your followers which is chronological (and the default) and "What's Hot" which is a haphazard very much placeholder timeline of the "most interacted with" posts, and I think that just means "13 likes or more, then chronological" at the moment. It's super basic and not at all the priority for them. From all I've seen in my time in the beta, the most important use case they are working towards is "let everyone pick their own way of sorting/filtering/moderating their timeline".
- RobotToaster 3y agoDoes blue-sky even implement federation yet?
- shadowfacts 3y agoThe article answers that question in the third sentence: > Soon, we’re launching a sandbox environment to begin the testing phase of federation for the AT Protocol with allow-listed servers.
- RobotToaster 3y agoSo it's vapourware
- sbarre 3y agoThe 60,000+ of us in the Bluesky beta would disagree but sure, be flippant. It's a work-in-progress. As I'm sure you know, you can't build and launch everything at once, so the rather small dev team has a roadmap, and is building and testing features in sequence. When they get close to launching a new major feature, like federation they make announcements and posts about it, to encourage discussion and debate about it, and look for early adopters who are willing to test it out.
- AHOHA 3y agoI frankly don’t care, and hope all “social media” are just like HN style, a thread about specific thing, and people discuss it, none of the crap of “content creators” or similar grifters, I also think personally youtube was ruined when it has all of those creators after it monetized the platform.
- nickstinemates 3y agoThere would be nothing to post to HN without "content creators"
- AHOHA 3y agoSame style not an identical one, where your contents are in the platform itself, not just a link, similar to old forums style where you write whatever you want and people discuss it back.
- afavour 3y agoOkay? I think it’s pretty clear that a lot of people don’t want all their social media to be like Hacker News though. And that’s fine.
- klabb3 3y agoI’ve come to the conclusion that “content creator” is a derogatory term.
- dymk 3y agoWhy would you come to that conclusion?
- fogzen 3y agoImagine if every time there was an article about ice cream people had to comment that they don’t like ice cream.
- AHOHA 3y ago
- instagary 3y agoWhat is their plan to monetize? Isn't the the saying: "if it's free, you're the product"?
- riffic 3y agoads, vc, data harvesting and brokerage, managed services (hosting, infra) on a subscription model offered to orgs? the ethical model is obviously ActivityPub tho adding more than snark to my reply: I want to know if the PBLLC intends to submit this protocol to the IETF or W3C. We do the RFC thing for a reason folks.
- goykasi 3y agoHow do ActivityPub/Mastodon servers monetize (or stay online)? Same way?
- riffic 3y agoin general they're either labors of love or they run on a donation basis. it's a really good question.
- MiscIdeaMaker99 3y agoThey don't.
- toofy 3y agothey typically don’t. this seems to be why many of the users prefer it. i think i generally agree with them—it leads to a different style of interaction. i haven’t figured out yet how to elequently describe it, but the interactions and experience is entirely different from a for-profit site. it feels “more pure” or something (though i do recognize why description is inadequate.) when “how do we monetize this?” becomes the driving force of a social thing, the experience changes in very real ways.
- goykasi 3y agoI think that is pretty fair, but maybe I am more interested in the "keeping it running" component. Labor of love and donations can only go so far. When a env/population outpaces love and donations, what keeps the servers online? Does the decentralized nature of Mastodon minimize cost? Or has it just not reached a critical mass? Im more interested in the Mastodon/Bluesky approach to re-decentralizing (we had thriving forums long ago). But eventually cost does add up and monetization (or a benevolent benefactor) has to be considered.
- toast0 3y ago+++ ATH
- lazzlazzlazz 3y agoIt's hard to see how this protocol would resist centralization, similar to Mastodon.
- goykasi 3y agoWhy do you think that? Of course some actors will be larger and more popular than others, but what about the protocol inherently leads to centralization?
- lazzlazzlazz 3y agoAll the strongest network effects accrue to components outside the protocol's control or within the direct control of the Blue Sky team.