7 ms·

Skyvew – View and share Bluesky threads without needing a Bluesky account

124 points by shakna 3y ago

fotta 3y ago
There’s also psky.app, but it’s generally just annoying having to edit the link before sharing, especially on mobile. I wish Bluesky would just stop login-walling links, it’s all public anyway. Edit: psky is retired now, but point still stands
spookie 3y ago
[flagged]
spookie 3y ago
It seems strange to me how BlueSky chose to implement an entirely different protocol when ActivityPub exists. My assumption for this was "for privacy". As in, not being completely public. Looking at their FAQ, they state that account portability was the main reason, but that doesn't seem right. Given that I have been able to port accounts from instance to instance on the Fediverse. My last reply to this thread may have not been obvious, but I'm genuinely interested on the reasons why. Anyhow, this project is interesting and I do hope more people use it to share their stuff. Have come across various links and I don't want to create yet another account for social media. As another sibling said, wish this was easier to do. But it isn't the fault of this project.
- zaphar 3y ago
  Porting accounts is very much not well supported. You can move the account but moving the messages/followers/following and other data is very much hit and miss. The protocol doesn't support that part. Bluesky's protocol has built in support for porting the entire account including all the data. It's protocol is also better suited for it.
  - tedunangst 3y ago
    Where can I port my data to using bluesky?
    - wmf 3y ago
      Anywhere, once Bluesky is out of beta.
      - smithcoin 3y ago
        Seems pretty obtuse no?
        josephg 3y ago
        Obtuse? It’s still in private beta. If it’s obtuse, that’s by design. They need time to figure out how the protocol should work before other implementations exist. Once an ecosystem of clients and servers appears, it will become very hard to change core details of the protocol.
  - vidarh 3y ago
    Mastodon very much supports moving followers/following. Not all others do, but the mechanism is well established. It does not yet support moving posts (it supports exporting them, but there's no import mechanism short of an admin manually doing a database import), but there's nothing that makes adding that technically difficult - it's down to coming to agreement about how to do it. That Bluesky in theory supports it is pretty irrelevant until they open up federation.
    - ekianjo 3y ago
      Since its a common ask I wonder why Mastodon has not implemeneted it yet...
      - vidarh 3y ago
        They've in the past raised some concerns about what it means that an old post re-surfaces on a new URL, signed by an old instance and it does make sense to do some thinking about exactly how to handle that. One option is to have the instance sign it, and drop the old actor id etc. from it, but then it will seem like it's originated from that instance to anyone who pulls it. So it's just a little bit of a hassle to work through the edge cases.
    - jameshart 3y ago
      In general, mastodon servers (well behaved ones at least) are kind of vouching for the timestamps of all the messages they host. If a user transfers their account over, with an archive of posts, and uploads them to a server saying 'trust me, bro, I totally posted all this stuff last year'... they're dumping a bunch of posts into that server's feed whose timestamps can't be vouched for. There might be mechanisms for a server to pull in the timestamps from the original host server, or to recognize the posts as having been streamed over previously... but uploading post archives is definitely a 'high trust' action for a server to take on behalf of a user.
      - wmf 3y ago
        Is this an official rationale? People can't migrate data because someone might backdate a post?
- wmf 3y ago
  It would be great to have a server that supports both protocols but that's probably too much to ask for.
- AlchemistCamp 3y ago
  Building yet another project on ActivityPub and expecting significantly better results would be irrational, IMO.
- josephg 3y ago
  I had a few late night conversations with the Bluesky devs last year at dweb. As others have mentioned, they care a lot about being able to move your entire account. It’s also very important to them that people can have millions of followers, and have the platform still perform well at that scale. That’s not an easy thing to do. I can’t remember the details, but I’m pretty sure activitypub is missing a bunch of core technical capabilities that they needed to make it work well. They’re certainly aware of activitypub. Christina (the author of activitypub) was at dweb too giving talks on Scheme and whatever her latest mad science was that year.
  - winwang 3y ago
    From my small personal perspective as someone who worked with ActivityPub a bit (side project), it's kind of an inefficient mess, no thanks to semantic web and JSON-LD (which, sure, it doesn't really need the full brunt of, iirc). Mastodon's "sub"set is a bit better, though.
- apitman 3y ago
  The fact that the biggest ActivityPub app doesn't consider bringing your own domain to an instance hosted by someone else as a critical ASAP feature gives me pause.
  - wmf 3y ago
    Wildebeest fixes this.
- strogonoff 3y ago
  ActivityPub—along with its lesser known counterpart LitePub that focuses on transience and privacy—makes creating a minimum viable “account for social media” approximately as easy as serving a few static JSON files from your domain[0], though there are nice minimal servers with more features[1], too. [0] https://justingarrison.com/blog/2022-12-06-mastodon-files-instance/ https://justingarrison.com/blog/2022-12-06-mastodon-files-in... [1] https://git.sr.ht/~tsileo/microblog.pub https://git.sr.ht/~tsileo/microblog.pub
  - Hamuko 3y ago
    >ActivityPub powered microblog >There is no imposed characters limit. Has the term "microblog" lost all meaning?
    - strogonoff 3y ago
      Yes.
nikolay 3y ago
I love Bluesky as it's so much better and faster than Mastodon and I'm only missing DMs.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
greentea23 3y ago
Why get bit by proprietary+centralized again when we have nostr now? https://nostr.how/en/what-is-nostr https://nostr.how/en/what-is-nostr and nostr even bridges to ActivityPub https://soapbox.pub/blog/mostr-fediverse-nostr-bridge/ https://soapbox.pub/blog/mostr-fediverse-nostr-bridge/
- vore 3y ago
  Huh? AT Protocol is neither proprietary nor centralized?
  - greentea23 3y ago
    Sure, AT protocol I agree. But Bluesky Social the practical entity as it stands today is a single, closed off instance, managed by a for-profit company. So I think it's still fair to say bluesky (but maybe not every piece comprising the production instance) is both proprietary and centralized. You can't run your own server, you may never be able to, and if you can it may never be allowed to connect with the "official" server, much like with Signal.
    - vore 3y ago
      I don’t think that’s true either; they’ve explicitly stated that their roadmap for 2024 is federation: https://atproto.com/blog/2023-protocol-roadmap https://atproto.com/blog/2023-protocol-roadmap
- throwaway290 3y ago
  Why would anyone bridge Nostr to ActivityPub instead of the opposite?
telegpt 3y ago
[dead]
justafolk 3y ago
How does one get an invite code for bluesky??
- photonbeam 3y ago
  I had the same problem back when twitter was acquired. It took so long I didn’t bother when an invite arrived, boat missed
  - animex 3y ago
    Same, I lost interest in it when it had my attention. Yes, I'm aware I can consume BlueSky in other apps. I've largely moved away from participatory social media apps after Twitter's demise. I am starting to see more activity on my Threads app pick up which wasn't there initially...so far the feed is fairly reasonable and the addition of voice-clips is intriguing.
  - throwaway290 3y ago
    Better wait until it's federated, because it'll likely change a lot in meantime. Why bother getting used to an unstable WIP with uncertain future? It was important to get in early on Twitter, it was centralized so people wanted to squat usernames, but Bluesky is decentralized so that's not a thing. I bet most people who beg for Bluesky invites just resell them, as accounts are otherwise completely worthless as soon as beta is over and federation rolls out.
- Hamuko 3y ago
  I have t̶w̶o̶ one Bluesky invite code burning in my pocket.
  - darkwater 3y ago
    Would you mind sending one? EDIT: thank you very much!!
  - skibble 3y ago
    If you still have one, I’d love to finally get in! Been on the waitlist for months with no luck. Edit: thank you SO much!
zoul 3y ago
All these alternative frontends, hacks and crutches are a sad testament to the state of the web.
- WendyTheWillow 3y ago
  Totally disagree; the alternative clients are providing invaluable feedback for the atprotocol.
  - zoul 3y ago
    Do we talk about “alternative” browsers? No, because there (still) is no “official” one, there’s (still) no single governing entity. Just standard protocols anyone is free to implement and join the party. See Mastodon – there is a kind of official web client and a kind of official native app and a kind of official default instance, but everyone is mostly free to do whatever they want. There are many great instances and clients. Not alternative clients – just clients. The difference being that an alternative client can be one day just cut off.
- Hamuko 3y ago
  The third-party ecosystem that Twitter used to have was anything but sad. It was great that you were able to choose what kind of an experience you'd have with the service. This is why I'm hoping that Bluesky will take Twitter's place now that the latter no longer exists.
  - zoul 3y ago
    The ecosystem was great and now it’s gone. Because they were not just clients, they were third-party clients, they were second class citizens. The more second class citizens we have on the web, the worse everyone gets. Because a random crazy billionare du jour can wake up one day and destroy a big chunk of the third-party ecosystem in a single decision.
- pyinstallwoes 3y ago
  In a way it begs for the most natural state of the web: client only front ends that sync with other clients. Anyone should be able to modify their front end to view the representation of information in any way they want.
shafyy 3y ago
I understand why Bluesky doesn't let anyone create an account just yet, but why don't they make posts publicly visible without needing an account? I think this is important for many news and governmental organizations to take Bluesky more seriously.
- gexla 3y ago
  Right, this would give me 100% of the functionality that I use on Twitter anyway.
- Hamuko 3y ago
  My guess would be that it's not a high priority and they just haven't gotten around to it yet. I think it was just a week or two ago that they added the ability to change your registered email address.
- lloydatkinson 3y ago
  I have invite codes
- looping8 3y ago
  Well, they're still in beta, even notifications weren't working that well up until recently. Plus, being closed off from the non-users might be a marketing thing. A lot of people were hyping it up with invites being seen as very desirable.
  - shafyy 3y ago
    I get the marketing thing, but if this is the only reason, they've missed the mark. That's cool to do for like a couple of months, not years.
  - WA 3y ago
    Remember Clubhouse? Dead thing, because they didn't open up fast enough (no Android). The momentum is there right now while Twitter is dying. If Bluesky doesn't get this straight within the next few months, I think it'll end up as "just another Mastodon instance" in the minds of people.
alphadelphi 3y ago
Great to see Bluesky getting some love from the devs, is such a nice platform 'till now. Looks like a meeting of all the best people after their escape from other poisoned platforms.
dagurp 3y ago
Is Bluesky a xitter alternative?
- snorremd 3y ago
  In that both are "microblogging" social networks, yes. The official app feels much like the Twitter app. And all the important user facing concepts are the same. Posts, reposts, quote posts and replies all work the same. Then you also have custom feeds in addition to the built in feeds. So people will make things like language specific feeds, feeds to follow a group of people (e.g. politicians), etc. Then there is a whole federated protocol, ATProto [1], underneath that has some interesting properties that also solves some of the issue faced with scalability and portability in the Fediverse protocol. [1] https://atproto.com/ https://atproto.com/
pierrelf 3y ago
> No data is collected, not even your IP address What a refreshing footer, lovely project too, happy to see some developer adoption of BlueSky. It's been pretty boring hanging out there, still nowhere near the amount of content Mastodon has. Hopefully projects like these will bring some attention and legitimacy to the platform
- ge96 3y ago
  I was wondering about not tracking ip address. If you use a 1-way hash from ip address, that would work right regarding being able to get unique views and not know IP?
  - bonton89 3y ago
    Isn't the ip address space so small that you can just hash the whole set and easily reverse it? Maybe some kind of salt could resolve that.
    - cmeacham98 3y ago
      It's still trivial to hash the full set of IPs with a salt appended. I'd personally just collect IPs with no other details - it's not really invasive in my opinion, and saying you don't collect IPs leaves you open to being wrong when you accidentally leave the web server log enabled.
      - graypegg 3y ago
        There's this odd fixation lately on IP Addresses being a very private, very scary thing to see logged, and I'm not sure why. It's obviously information somewhat linked to you and a geographic location, so de-anonymising possibly but it's also how packets are routed back to you. I don't expect web services to treat my information as public, but I do expect them to at least have an access log privately.
  - graypegg 3y ago
    According to the response headers at least, nginx is reverse-proxying to an express app. (at least it seems that way from: https://github.com/badlogic/skyview/blob/main/server.ts#L46 https://github.com/badlogic/skyview/blob/main/server.ts#L46, but maybe nginx is also configured to serve static files first as well as reverse proxy.) Without the nginx config, you can't really know what's going on, but at least the express app isn't storing any information beyond what it needs to actually respond. The nginx log probably lists IP addresses so the footer is possibly incorrect. Not going to be hyper pedantic though, cool stuff @badlogic!
scudsworth 3y ago
wow, somehow it's a website with even less features

124 points by shakna 3y ago

There’s also psky.app, but it’s generally just annoying having to edit the link before sharing, especially on mobile. I wish Bluesky would just stop login-walling links, it’s all public anyway. Edit: psky is retired now, but point still stands

spookie 3y ago

[flagged]

spookie 3y ago

It seems strange to me how BlueSky chose to implement an entirely different protocol when ActivityPub exists. My assumption for this was "for privacy". As in, not being completely public. Looking at their FAQ, they state that account portability was the main reason, but that doesn't seem right. Given that I have been able to port accounts from instance to instance on the Fediverse. My last reply to this thread may have not been obvious, but I'm genuinely interested on the reasons why. Anyhow, this project is interesting and I do hope more people use it to share their stuff. Have come across various links and I don't want to create yet another account for social media. As another sibling said, wish this was easier to do. But it isn't the fault of this project.

zaphar 3y ago
Porting accounts is very much not well supported. You can move the account but moving the messages/followers/following and other data is very much hit and miss. The protocol doesn't support that part. Bluesky's protocol has built in support for porting the entire account including all the data. It's protocol is also better suited for it.
- tedunangst 3y ago
  Where can I port my data to using bluesky?
  - wmf 3y ago
    Anywhere, once Bluesky is out of beta.
    - smithcoin 3y ago
      Seems pretty obtuse no?
      - josephg 3y ago
        Obtuse? It’s still in private beta. If it’s obtuse, that’s by design. They need time to figure out how the protocol should work before other implementations exist. Once an ecosystem of clients and servers appears, it will become very hard to change core details of the protocol.
- vidarh 3y ago
  Mastodon very much supports moving followers/following. Not all others do, but the mechanism is well established. It does not yet support moving posts (it supports exporting them, but there's no import mechanism short of an admin manually doing a database import), but there's nothing that makes adding that technically difficult - it's down to coming to agreement about how to do it. That Bluesky in theory supports it is pretty irrelevant until they open up federation.
  - ekianjo 3y ago
    Since its a common ask I wonder why Mastodon has not implemeneted it yet...
    - vidarh 3y ago
      They've in the past raised some concerns about what it means that an old post re-surfaces on a new URL, signed by an old instance and it does make sense to do some thinking about exactly how to handle that. One option is to have the instance sign it, and drop the old actor id etc. from it, but then it will seem like it's originated from that instance to anyone who pulls it. So it's just a little bit of a hassle to work through the edge cases.
  - jameshart 3y ago
    In general, mastodon servers (well behaved ones at least) are kind of vouching for the timestamps of all the messages they host. If a user transfers their account over, with an archive of posts, and uploads them to a server saying 'trust me, bro, I totally posted all this stuff last year'... they're dumping a bunch of posts into that server's feed whose timestamps can't be vouched for. There might be mechanisms for a server to pull in the timestamps from the original host server, or to recognize the posts as having been streamed over previously... but uploading post archives is definitely a 'high trust' action for a server to take on behalf of a user.
    - wmf 3y ago
      Is this an official rationale? People can't migrate data because someone might backdate a post?
wmf 3y ago
It would be great to have a server that supports both protocols but that's probably too much to ask for.
AlchemistCamp 3y ago
Building yet another project on ActivityPub and expecting significantly better results would be irrational, IMO.
josephg 3y ago
I had a few late night conversations with the Bluesky devs last year at dweb. As others have mentioned, they care a lot about being able to move your entire account. It’s also very important to them that people can have millions of followers, and have the platform still perform well at that scale. That’s not an easy thing to do. I can’t remember the details, but I’m pretty sure activitypub is missing a bunch of core technical capabilities that they needed to make it work well. They’re certainly aware of activitypub. Christina (the author of activitypub) was at dweb too giving talks on Scheme and whatever her latest mad science was that year.
- winwang 3y ago
  From my small personal perspective as someone who worked with ActivityPub a bit (side project), it's kind of an inefficient mess, no thanks to semantic web and JSON-LD (which, sure, it doesn't really need the full brunt of, iirc). Mastodon's "sub"set is a bit better, though.
apitman 3y ago
The fact that the biggest ActivityPub app doesn't consider bringing your own domain to an instance hosted by someone else as a critical ASAP feature gives me pause.
- wmf 3y ago
  Wildebeest fixes this.
strogonoff 3y ago
ActivityPub—along with its lesser known counterpart LitePub that focuses on transience and privacy—makes creating a minimum viable “account for social media” approximately as easy as serving a few static JSON files from your domain[0], though there are nice minimal servers with more features[1], too. [0] https://justingarrison.com/blog/2022-12-06-mastodon-files-instance/ https://justingarrison.com/blog/2022-12-06-mastodon-files-in... [1] https://git.sr.ht/~tsileo/microblog.pub https://git.sr.ht/~tsileo/microblog.pub
- Hamuko 3y ago
  >ActivityPub powered microblog >There is no imposed characters limit. Has the term "microblog" lost all meaning?
  - strogonoff 3y ago
    Yes.

nikolay 3y ago

I love Bluesky as it's so much better and faster than Mastodon and I'm only missing DMs.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

greentea23 3y ago

Why get bit by proprietary+centralized again when we have nostr now? https://nostr.how/en/what-is-nostr https://nostr.how/en/what-is-nostr and nostr even bridges to ActivityPub https://soapbox.pub/blog/mostr-fediverse-nostr-bridge/ https://soapbox.pub/blog/mostr-fediverse-nostr-bridge/

vore 3y ago
Huh? AT Protocol is neither proprietary nor centralized?
- greentea23 3y ago
  Sure, AT protocol I agree. But Bluesky Social the practical entity as it stands today is a single, closed off instance, managed by a for-profit company. So I think it's still fair to say bluesky (but maybe not every piece comprising the production instance) is both proprietary and centralized. You can't run your own server, you may never be able to, and if you can it may never be allowed to connect with the "official" server, much like with Signal.
  - vore 3y ago
    I don’t think that’s true either; they’ve explicitly stated that their roadmap for 2024 is federation: https://atproto.com/blog/2023-protocol-roadmap https://atproto.com/blog/2023-protocol-roadmap
throwaway290 3y ago
Why would anyone bridge Nostr to ActivityPub instead of the opposite?

telegpt 3y ago

[dead]

justafolk 3y ago

How does one get an invite code for bluesky??

photonbeam 3y ago
I had the same problem back when twitter was acquired. It took so long I didn’t bother when an invite arrived, boat missed
- animex 3y ago
  Same, I lost interest in it when it had my attention. Yes, I'm aware I can consume BlueSky in other apps. I've largely moved away from participatory social media apps after Twitter's demise. I am starting to see more activity on my Threads app pick up which wasn't there initially...so far the feed is fairly reasonable and the addition of voice-clips is intriguing.
- throwaway290 3y ago
  Better wait until it's federated, because it'll likely change a lot in meantime. Why bother getting used to an unstable WIP with uncertain future? It was important to get in early on Twitter, it was centralized so people wanted to squat usernames, but Bluesky is decentralized so that's not a thing. I bet most people who beg for Bluesky invites just resell them, as accounts are otherwise completely worthless as soon as beta is over and federation rolls out.
Hamuko 3y ago
I have t̶w̶o̶ one Bluesky invite code burning in my pocket.
- darkwater 3y ago
  Would you mind sending one? EDIT: thank you very much!!
- skibble 3y ago
  If you still have one, I’d love to finally get in! Been on the waitlist for months with no luck. Edit: thank you SO much!

zoul 3y ago

All these alternative frontends, hacks and crutches are a sad testament to the state of the web.

WendyTheWillow 3y ago
Totally disagree; the alternative clients are providing invaluable feedback for the atprotocol.
- zoul 3y ago
  Do we talk about “alternative” browsers? No, because there (still) is no “official” one, there’s (still) no single governing entity. Just standard protocols anyone is free to implement and join the party. See Mastodon – there is a kind of official web client and a kind of official native app and a kind of official default instance, but everyone is mostly free to do whatever they want. There are many great instances and clients. Not alternative clients – just clients. The difference being that an alternative client can be one day just cut off.
Hamuko 3y ago
The third-party ecosystem that Twitter used to have was anything but sad. It was great that you were able to choose what kind of an experience you'd have with the service. This is why I'm hoping that Bluesky will take Twitter's place now that the latter no longer exists.
- zoul 3y ago
  The ecosystem was great and now it’s gone. Because they were not just clients, they were third-party clients, they were second class citizens. The more second class citizens we have on the web, the worse everyone gets. Because a random crazy billionare du jour can wake up one day and destroy a big chunk of the third-party ecosystem in a single decision.
pyinstallwoes 3y ago
In a way it begs for the most natural state of the web: client only front ends that sync with other clients. Anyone should be able to modify their front end to view the representation of information in any way they want.

shafyy 3y ago

I understand why Bluesky doesn't let anyone create an account just yet, but why don't they make posts publicly visible without needing an account? I think this is important for many news and governmental organizations to take Bluesky more seriously.

gexla 3y ago
Right, this would give me 100% of the functionality that I use on Twitter anyway.
Hamuko 3y ago
My guess would be that it's not a high priority and they just haven't gotten around to it yet. I think it was just a week or two ago that they added the ability to change your registered email address.
lloydatkinson 3y ago
I have invite codes
looping8 3y ago
Well, they're still in beta, even notifications weren't working that well up until recently. Plus, being closed off from the non-users might be a marketing thing. A lot of people were hyping it up with invites being seen as very desirable.
- shafyy 3y ago
  I get the marketing thing, but if this is the only reason, they've missed the mark. That's cool to do for like a couple of months, not years.
- WA 3y ago
  Remember Clubhouse? Dead thing, because they didn't open up fast enough (no Android). The momentum is there right now while Twitter is dying. If Bluesky doesn't get this straight within the next few months, I think it'll end up as "just another Mastodon instance" in the minds of people.

alphadelphi 3y ago

Great to see Bluesky getting some love from the devs, is such a nice platform 'till now. Looks like a meeting of all the best people after their escape from other poisoned platforms.

dagurp 3y ago

Is Bluesky a xitter alternative?

snorremd 3y ago
In that both are "microblogging" social networks, yes. The official app feels much like the Twitter app. And all the important user facing concepts are the same. Posts, reposts, quote posts and replies all work the same. Then you also have custom feeds in addition to the built in feeds. So people will make things like language specific feeds, feeds to follow a group of people (e.g. politicians), etc. Then there is a whole federated protocol, ATProto [1], underneath that has some interesting properties that also solves some of the issue faced with scalability and portability in the Fediverse protocol. [1] https://atproto.com/ https://atproto.com/

pierrelf 3y ago

> No data is collected, not even your IP address What a refreshing footer, lovely project too, happy to see some developer adoption of BlueSky. It's been pretty boring hanging out there, still nowhere near the amount of content Mastodon has. Hopefully projects like these will bring some attention and legitimacy to the platform

ge96 3y ago
I was wondering about not tracking ip address. If you use a 1-way hash from ip address, that would work right regarding being able to get unique views and not know IP?
- bonton89 3y ago
  Isn't the ip address space so small that you can just hash the whole set and easily reverse it? Maybe some kind of salt could resolve that.
  - cmeacham98 3y ago
    It's still trivial to hash the full set of IPs with a salt appended. I'd personally just collect IPs with no other details - it's not really invasive in my opinion, and saying you don't collect IPs leaves you open to being wrong when you accidentally leave the web server log enabled.
    - graypegg 3y ago
      There's this odd fixation lately on IP Addresses being a very private, very scary thing to see logged, and I'm not sure why. It's obviously information somewhat linked to you and a geographic location, so de-anonymising possibly but it's also how packets are routed back to you. I don't expect web services to treat my information as public, but I do expect them to at least have an access log privately.
- graypegg 3y ago
  According to the response headers at least, nginx is reverse-proxying to an express app. (at least it seems that way from: https://github.com/badlogic/skyview/blob/main/server.ts#L46 https://github.com/badlogic/skyview/blob/main/server.ts#L46, but maybe nginx is also configured to serve static files first as well as reverse proxy.) Without the nginx config, you can't really know what's going on, but at least the express app isn't storing any information beyond what it needs to actually respond. The nginx log probably lists IP addresses so the footer is possibly incorrect. Not going to be hyper pedantic though, cool stuff @badlogic!

scudsworth 3y ago

wow, somehow it's a website with even less features