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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, n

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.

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.