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This is a big milestone for Bluesky! We've had the federation sandbox running for over six months but we're now able to commit to open federation on the produc

This is a big milestone for Bluesky! We've had the federation sandbox running for over six months but we're now able to commit to open federation on the production network this month as well. There's also stackable moderation coming shortly, which enables other individuals/orgs to operate moderation labeling services that users can choose to use. The technical challenges of setting up an (efficiently) scalable decentralized social network were quite interesting. The infrastructure itself is quite decentralized, with standalone PDS instances and two small shared-nothing datacenter PoPs. We're using SQLite with millions of individual databases for each user's repository and ScyllaDB for the global indexing service (AppView). https://bsky.social/about/blog/5-5-2023-federation-architecture https://bsky.social/about/blog/5-5-2023-federation-architect... If anyone has questions, technical or otherwise, some of the team should be around today to answer them. Edit: HN'ers might also appreciate this paper written primarily by Martin Kleppman about Bluesky and AT Protocol https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.03239.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.03239.pdf

radlad 3y ago
> There's also stackable moderation coming shortly, which enables other individuals/orgs to operate moderation labeling services that users can choose to use. Very excited for this - IMO, this is federated social media's biggest promise.
- cdchn 3y ago
  "We tag trolls so you don't have to."
  - radlad 3y ago
    I'm not sure if you're being facetious or not, so I'll explain further. Currently, if you want to be part of a social network, your options are to opt-in to Zuckerberg's moderation or Musk's moderation. It would be great if these were _actually_ opt-in (as in, you can be part of a social network without opting in to their moderation polices) and if you can use anyone's "moderation list." I think ultimately this would allow for freer expression than exists on current social networks.
    - cdchn 3y ago
      Ultimately is what you end up with is being held under some instance operator's even more capricious, arbitrary and biases moderation "policy." Although I think calling it a policy might be a bit generous.
      - radlad 3y ago
        This is exactly why I love the promise of moderation lists (as opposed to "choosing an instance.")
    - tqi 3y ago
      It's interesting that 10 years ago there was a media driven panic about "filter bubbles", and now we are at a point where the abilitiy to choose your own filter bubble is considered a feature.
      - MadcapJake 3y ago
        You missed the middle: the collective realization that socializing is not a public activity, it's bubbles all the way down. No one wants vitriolic arguments outside of debate club...
muglug 3y ago
Thanks for all your hard work! Twitter is an obvious influence on Bluesky. Was the team able to benefit from the experience of working on Twitter, or were most of the big problems novel?
- pfraze 3y ago
  None of us worked at Twitter actually, but we chatted with a lot of folks who did.
marxisttemp 3y ago
Why not use ActivityPub? Why should we trust Dorsey again? What is one good reason to use Bluesky over Mastodon?
- TheCleric 3y ago
  Dorsey isn’t even involved. He kicked it off but hasn’t had a hand in it for a very long time.
- jakebsky 3y ago
  1. "Account portability is the major reason why we chose to build a separate protocol. We consider portability to be crucial because it protects users from sudden bans, server shutdowns, and policy disagreements." https://atproto.com/guides/faq https://atproto.com/guides/faq 2. Jack Dorsey is on the board but has no day-to-day role in the company. Jay Graber is the CEO of Bluesky and is in control. The protocol is also designed not to require trust. The network is being "locked open" in a way that would allow it to survive Bluesky becoming evil. 3. Bluesky has a different approach in many ways. One of the biggest differences is that Bluesky is (IMHO) the first decentralized social network that is highly usable by regular non-technical users.
  - novemp 3y ago
    [dead]
  - shafyy 3y ago
    I'm more worried about the financing of Bluesky. You have taken VC money, and we all know what that means - growth at all costs. > The protocol is also designed not to require trust. The network is being "locked open" in a way that would allow it to survive Bluesky becoming evil. I feel like we have seen this movie play out a few times. There are always way to close things down the road. For example, I can imagine that even with federation there will be a power law of distribution, and there's a high chance that most users will end up on official Bluesky servers. This means that you could one they stop federating, and most users would be backed in a walled garden. Sure, the protocol would be out there in the open, but it wouldn't matter because overnight it would lose most of its users. I trust that you and the initial team has genuine motivation not to do this. Forgive me for being cynical, but history does reapeat itself. I think the only antidote against this is regulation, as we're seing now with the DMA in EU that forces WhatsApp and other gate keepers to open their platform to other clients.
Kye 3y ago
What's the thinking on BGSes? I haven't seen much talk of who's expected to run them or what they'll look like, but they seem to be the linchpin of reliable data portability.
- jakebsky 3y ago
  A Relay (we used to call it the BGS) crawls all of the PDS hosts on the network and aggregates the data. This makes it possible for services to subscribe to all events on the network without putting load on PDS hosts directly. Anyone can run a Relay. They're somewhat comparable to Linux distribution FTP/HTTP mirrors. Bluesky will always run a Relay, but other organizations will hopefully as well. We expect these might be organizations doing other things in the ecosystem, universities, and possibly open consortiums.
Navarr 3y ago
Is it completely infeasible for BlueSky to federate with ActivityPub while maintaining the pros of its architecture? If Threads, BlueSky, and ActivityPub all interconnected it really would be a great opportunity to compete on the software / UX front
- jakebsky 3y ago
  There has been some work by others already on this front: https://docs.bsky.app/blog/feature-bridgyfed https://docs.bsky.app/blog/feature-bridgyfed
zimpenfish 3y ago
> we're now able to commit to open federation on the production network this month as well Aha, this is good to now. Looking forward to standing up my own PDS.
coldpie 3y ago
The obvious question is what your business model is. I know about your "we plan to sell domains" post from a bit ago[1], but that seems... optimistic, to me. Not sure I want to buy into yet another startup with no business model (e.g. Keybase). [1] https://bsky.social/about/blog/7-05-2023-business-plan https://bsky.social/about/blog/7-05-2023-business-plan
- jakebsky 3y ago
  Bluesky is in good financial shape for quite some time based on existing funding. And we're also working hard to be sustainable, which we believe is entirely feasible given our small team. But we're also ensuring that everything required to make the network sustainable over time is completely open.
  - coldpie 3y ago
    That's not a very inspiring answer :( The consequences of taking VC money are going to come home to roost at some point.
    - jakebsky 3y ago
      We'll see! The history of funded companies popularizing open protocols is not without precedent. I'm inspired by Netscape, which was the VC-backed company that made the web happen.
      - coldpie 3y ago
        A notable difference is that Netscape had a business model, namely, selling Navigator. Anyway, enjoy the ride.
      - vidarh 3y ago
        Saying they "made the web happen" is just nonsense. They had one of several popular browsers, and one of several popular web servers. As much as I stayed up late to download new Netscape betas, had they never existed the web would still be just fine, and the customers of the ISP I ran at the time would have just used another browser.
RobotToaster 3y ago
>There's also stackable moderation coming shortly, which enables other individuals/orgs to operate moderation labeling services that users can choose to use. Will people be able to opt out of your moderation services?
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
  It sounds like you have to opt-in.
- jakebsky 3y ago
  Yes, every part of the Bluesky (atproto) network is composable, including moderation (labeling).
- tracker1 3y ago
  This is my big question as well. As long as I'm able to block at an individual, or even org level, I'm generally okay seeing a feed of those I follow. Most social media moderation in my experience tends to be heavy handed. Most jokes could be offensive to someone and likely are. I'd prefer to preserve the collective works if George Carlin and Richard Pryor over heavily filtered systems. Edit: appears to be completely opt in and based on tagging... Wonder about positive filtering by tag now...
skybrian 3y ago
Any plans to improve the search engine?
- jakebsky 3y ago
  Yes, it's always a bit of an after thought (unfortunately) but we have improved it already a couple of times. And like most things with atproto, there will likely be protocol support for pluggable search engines, so users can choose their search provider(s). It's already entirely possible for others to operate atproto search engines since all the data is public and available.
daveloyall 3y ago
Y'all let the public in before finishing your wait-list. I joined the list on 2023-03-02. Y'all didn't email me that signups were going to be public. Y'all didn't email me when signups actually went public. I found out about it here. ...And, let's see.. Yep, my handle is taken.
- pierat 3y ago
  Well, join Mastodon! Find a community (server) that fits your liking and get your username! You can talk with anybody on other servers, but the one you choose is your homebase! https://joinmastodon.org/servers https://joinmastodon.org/servers At least you're not succumbing to a commercial interest who will inevitably enshittify for eventual profit extraction.
- ipqk 3y ago
  Yeah, it's pretty ridiculous. On the other hand, the benefit of decentralized services is that your handle being taken shouldn't (eventually) matter, because you can just find another server.
- jakebsky 3y ago
  Sorry about that. You definitely should have received a waitlist invite. We did invite everyone on the waitlist before launching. The deliverability of those emails was quite high but it's possible it went to the spam folder or something else went wrong. Something like 1 million of the users that joined came from the waitlist. Most users on HN are probably able to navigate using a domain handle, which is really the recommended and most decentralized option. https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-28-2023-domain-handle-tutorial https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-28-2023-domain-handle-tutor...
- omoikane 3y ago
  Same here, I was on the waitlist for a few months, during that time I saw no evidence that anyone joined Bluesky via the waitlist. Eventually I got lucky and found someone who was giving out invites on Twitter, but by then all of my friends are no longer interested in joining yet another social network. I hope Bluesky prospers since it has some features that Mastodon and Twitter lacks, but it has a lot of catching up to do.
pentagrama 3y ago
I tried to sign up and it requires a phone number to verify trough SMS. Question. The phone will be attached to my account or is for one-time verification? If the latter, it is removed from blue sky database at some point? Thanks.

radlad 3y ago

> There's also stackable moderation coming shortly, which enables other individuals/orgs to operate moderation labeling services that users can choose to use. Very excited for this - IMO, this is federated social media's biggest promise.

cdchn 3y ago
"We tag trolls so you don't have to."
- radlad 3y ago
  I'm not sure if you're being facetious or not, so I'll explain further. Currently, if you want to be part of a social network, your options are to opt-in to Zuckerberg's moderation or Musk's moderation. It would be great if these were _actually_ opt-in (as in, you can be part of a social network without opting in to their moderation polices) and if you can use anyone's "moderation list." I think ultimately this would allow for freer expression than exists on current social networks.
  - cdchn 3y ago
    Ultimately is what you end up with is being held under some instance operator's even more capricious, arbitrary and biases moderation "policy." Although I think calling it a policy might be a bit generous.
    - radlad 3y ago
      This is exactly why I love the promise of moderation lists (as opposed to "choosing an instance.")
  - tqi 3y ago
    It's interesting that 10 years ago there was a media driven panic about "filter bubbles", and now we are at a point where the abilitiy to choose your own filter bubble is considered a feature.
    - MadcapJake 3y ago
      You missed the middle: the collective realization that socializing is not a public activity, it's bubbles all the way down. No one wants vitriolic arguments outside of debate club...

muglug 3y ago

Thanks for all your hard work! Twitter is an obvious influence on Bluesky. Was the team able to benefit from the experience of working on Twitter, or were most of the big problems novel?

pfraze 3y ago
None of us worked at Twitter actually, but we chatted with a lot of folks who did.

marxisttemp 3y ago

Why not use ActivityPub? Why should we trust Dorsey again? What is one good reason to use Bluesky over Mastodon?

TheCleric 3y ago
Dorsey isn’t even involved. He kicked it off but hasn’t had a hand in it for a very long time.
jakebsky 3y ago
1. "Account portability is the major reason why we chose to build a separate protocol. We consider portability to be crucial because it protects users from sudden bans, server shutdowns, and policy disagreements." https://atproto.com/guides/faq https://atproto.com/guides/faq 2. Jack Dorsey is on the board but has no day-to-day role in the company. Jay Graber is the CEO of Bluesky and is in control. The protocol is also designed not to require trust. The network is being "locked open" in a way that would allow it to survive Bluesky becoming evil. 3. Bluesky has a different approach in many ways. One of the biggest differences is that Bluesky is (IMHO) the first decentralized social network that is highly usable by regular non-technical users.
- novemp 3y ago
  [dead]
- shafyy 3y ago
  I'm more worried about the financing of Bluesky. You have taken VC money, and we all know what that means - growth at all costs. > The protocol is also designed not to require trust. The network is being "locked open" in a way that would allow it to survive Bluesky becoming evil. I feel like we have seen this movie play out a few times. There are always way to close things down the road. For example, I can imagine that even with federation there will be a power law of distribution, and there's a high chance that most users will end up on official Bluesky servers. This means that you could one they stop federating, and most users would be backed in a walled garden. Sure, the protocol would be out there in the open, but it wouldn't matter because overnight it would lose most of its users. I trust that you and the initial team has genuine motivation not to do this. Forgive me for being cynical, but history does reapeat itself. I think the only antidote against this is regulation, as we're seing now with the DMA in EU that forces WhatsApp and other gate keepers to open their platform to other clients.

Kye 3y ago

What's the thinking on BGSes? I haven't seen much talk of who's expected to run them or what they'll look like, but they seem to be the linchpin of reliable data portability.

jakebsky 3y ago
A Relay (we used to call it the BGS) crawls all of the PDS hosts on the network and aggregates the data. This makes it possible for services to subscribe to all events on the network without putting load on PDS hosts directly. Anyone can run a Relay. They're somewhat comparable to Linux distribution FTP/HTTP mirrors. Bluesky will always run a Relay, but other organizations will hopefully as well. We expect these might be organizations doing other things in the ecosystem, universities, and possibly open consortiums.

Navarr 3y ago

Is it completely infeasible for BlueSky to federate with ActivityPub while maintaining the pros of its architecture? If Threads, BlueSky, and ActivityPub all interconnected it really would be a great opportunity to compete on the software / UX front

jakebsky 3y ago
There has been some work by others already on this front: https://docs.bsky.app/blog/feature-bridgyfed https://docs.bsky.app/blog/feature-bridgyfed

zimpenfish 3y ago

> we're now able to commit to open federation on the production network this month as well Aha, this is good to now. Looking forward to standing up my own PDS.

coldpie 3y ago

The obvious question is what your business model is. I know about your "we plan to sell domains" post from a bit ago[1], but that seems... optimistic, to me. Not sure I want to buy into yet another startup with no business model (e.g. Keybase). [1] https://bsky.social/about/blog/7-05-2023-business-plan https://bsky.social/about/blog/7-05-2023-business-plan

jakebsky 3y ago
Bluesky is in good financial shape for quite some time based on existing funding. And we're also working hard to be sustainable, which we believe is entirely feasible given our small team. But we're also ensuring that everything required to make the network sustainable over time is completely open.
- coldpie 3y ago
  That's not a very inspiring answer :( The consequences of taking VC money are going to come home to roost at some point.
  - jakebsky 3y ago
    We'll see! The history of funded companies popularizing open protocols is not without precedent. I'm inspired by Netscape, which was the VC-backed company that made the web happen.
    - coldpie 3y ago
      A notable difference is that Netscape had a business model, namely, selling Navigator. Anyway, enjoy the ride.
    - vidarh 3y ago
      Saying they "made the web happen" is just nonsense. They had one of several popular browsers, and one of several popular web servers. As much as I stayed up late to download new Netscape betas, had they never existed the web would still be just fine, and the customers of the ISP I ran at the time would have just used another browser.

RobotToaster 3y ago

>There's also stackable moderation coming shortly, which enables other individuals/orgs to operate moderation labeling services that users can choose to use. Will people be able to opt out of your moderation services?

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
It sounds like you have to opt-in.
jakebsky 3y ago
Yes, every part of the Bluesky (atproto) network is composable, including moderation (labeling).
tracker1 3y ago
This is my big question as well. As long as I'm able to block at an individual, or even org level, I'm generally okay seeing a feed of those I follow. Most social media moderation in my experience tends to be heavy handed. Most jokes could be offensive to someone and likely are. I'd prefer to preserve the collective works if George Carlin and Richard Pryor over heavily filtered systems. Edit: appears to be completely opt in and based on tagging... Wonder about positive filtering by tag now...

skybrian 3y ago

Any plans to improve the search engine?

jakebsky 3y ago
Yes, it's always a bit of an after thought (unfortunately) but we have improved it already a couple of times. And like most things with atproto, there will likely be protocol support for pluggable search engines, so users can choose their search provider(s). It's already entirely possible for others to operate atproto search engines since all the data is public and available.

daveloyall 3y ago

Y'all let the public in before finishing your wait-list. I joined the list on 2023-03-02. Y'all didn't email me that signups were going to be public. Y'all didn't email me when signups actually went public. I found out about it here. ...And, let's see.. Yep, my handle is taken.

pierat 3y ago
Well, join Mastodon! Find a community (server) that fits your liking and get your username! You can talk with anybody on other servers, but the one you choose is your homebase! https://joinmastodon.org/servers https://joinmastodon.org/servers At least you're not succumbing to a commercial interest who will inevitably enshittify for eventual profit extraction.
ipqk 3y ago
Yeah, it's pretty ridiculous. On the other hand, the benefit of decentralized services is that your handle being taken shouldn't (eventually) matter, because you can just find another server.
jakebsky 3y ago
Sorry about that. You definitely should have received a waitlist invite. We did invite everyone on the waitlist before launching. The deliverability of those emails was quite high but it's possible it went to the spam folder or something else went wrong. Something like 1 million of the users that joined came from the waitlist. Most users on HN are probably able to navigate using a domain handle, which is really the recommended and most decentralized option. https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-28-2023-domain-handle-tutorial https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-28-2023-domain-handle-tutor...
omoikane 3y ago
Same here, I was on the waitlist for a few months, during that time I saw no evidence that anyone joined Bluesky via the waitlist. Eventually I got lucky and found someone who was giving out invites on Twitter, but by then all of my friends are no longer interested in joining yet another social network. I hope Bluesky prospers since it has some features that Mastodon and Twitter lacks, but it has a lot of catching up to do.

pentagrama 3y ago

I tried to sign up and it requires a phone number to verify trough SMS. Question. The phone will be attached to my account or is for one-time verification? If the latter, it is removed from blue sky database at some point? Thanks.