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Neat! I'm not surprised at the findings here. BlueSky (for the average user) is pretty much a drop in replacement for Twitter. Despite the smaller total number

by d4mi3n 1y ago

Neat! I'm not surprised at the findings here. BlueSky (for the average user) is pretty much a drop in replacement for Twitter. Despite the smaller total numbers in Mastadon, it's great to see that the ecosystem seems to be successfully avoiding centralization like we've seen in the AT-Proto ecosystem. I suspect that the cost of running AT proto servers/relays is prohibitive for smaller players compared to a Mastadon server selectively syndicating with a few peers, but I say this with only a vague understanding of the internals of both of these ecosystems.

isodev 1y ago
ATProto also has the downside of being supported by a corporation and investors with various backgrounds that will eventually want to earn something out of it all and there is no telling how this will happen.
- gary_0 1y ago
  There are lots of ways they could make a sustainable income without disrupting Bluesky's current status quo and be comfortably rich for the rest of their lives... but that's completely out of character for them and will never happen. I do think the geeks currently running Bluesky are sincere in keeping it decentralized, but the money people will someday probably force them out and squeeze the user base for a quick buck. A hardcore nerd minority will splinter off, though, and keep the decentralized version running, so whatever. History repeats. Frog swims, scorpion stings.
  - robertlagrant 1y ago
    Is it a quick buck? How long has bluesky been funded for with no return?
    - gary_0 1y ago
      I meant "quick buck" like flooding the place with ads, tracking, dark patterns, closing the API/protocol, or doing some sort of crypto scam, with no regard for the platform's long-term health. It's been funded for a few years? That's not really that long for such a small team. But I have no idea how their investors think it might make "Facebook money", and isn't that always the goal?
    - Dylan16807 1y ago
      Quick meaning it's short term from when it starts. The time before it starts doesn't factor in.
      - robertlagrant 1y ago
        A quick buck would be the time from when you put your money in to when you get back your money and a profit.
        Dylan16807 1y ago
        If you have a sudden massive change in plans like this, it resets the timer. You were doing long term, but now you want a quick buck and you don't care much if the company survives. If I set up a get rich quick scheme based on overhyping and selling land, it doesn't matter whether I buy the land today or it's land I had for decades for a completely different reason. Either way I'm going for a quick buck now.
        robertlagrant 1y ago
        But they didn't have this for completely different reasons. They invested money years ago, that they could've bought government bonds with and just earned interest, and instead it went into BlueSky. At some point they'd like a return that would substantially beat the government bond they could've invested in with zero risk.
        Dylan16807 1y ago
        They invested for the long term. If they suddenly want the company to go all-in on short term profit extraction that is a big change in plan.
        robertlagrant 1y ago
        I agree, but I doubt from their perspective it's a quick buck. I appreciate from the perspective of people who got a free service and it's now getting monetised it might feel quick, but surely not surprising at some point. And they got a quick buck up front from not having to pay for the service, which is nice :)
  - YetAnotherNick 1y ago
    > There are lots of ways they could make a sustainable income without disrupting Bluesky's current status quo Like what?
    - gary_0 1y ago
      Off the top of my head: Paid hosting/services on top of the protocol, reddit-gold style tipping and gamification, being a transactional middleman (there are a lot of artists selling things, famous people promoting things, and so on), promoted posts and ads (easily blockable, but some users wouldn't bother). Bluesky is a small team of like ~30 people, if they keep running lean they have at least a chance of a decent profit margin. But none of that will make anyone a multi-billionaire, so never mind.
      - YetAnotherNick 1y ago
        I think you are wildly overestimating the user's willingness to pay online, and underestimating the costs to run a large scale site. Even if you remove developer's salaries and server costs, the fines could be worth 10s of millions of dollar per country just for delay in removal of hate speech[1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Enforcement_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Enforcement_Act
      - miki123211 1y ago
        They could also follow the Gmail playbook. For consumers, plenty of ads and plenty of tracking. For businesses, heavily-restricted user-to-server APIs and features gated behind subscriptions, think custom domains with Bsky hosting, multi-user post approvals, integrating DMs with customer support systems etc. You can do all of that while still being fair to and interoperable with the rest of the ecosystem. As long as you don't want the convenience, features and UI of Gmail, you can still communicate with Gmail users from any other provider, and the same could be true about Bsky.
  - beeflet 1y ago
    >There are lots of ways they could make a sustainable income without disrupting Bluesky's current status quo and be comfortably rich for the rest of their lives... but that's completely out of character for them and will never happen. Sounds like reddit 15 years ago
- Matl 1y ago
  ATProto also currently effectively relies on https://web.plc.directory https://web.plc.directory which is a centralized service, making the protocol effectively centralized.
  - danabramov 1y ago
    This is true but it's worth noting that (1) the entire point of this node is to be globally agreed on since it's the root of the identity mechanism, (2) it is auditable (https://github.com/did-method-plc/did-method-plc?tab=readme-ov-file#audit-logs https://github.com/did-method-plc/did-method-plc?tab=readme-...) and operations themselves are self-certifying (https://github.com/did-method-plc/did-method-plc?tab=readme-ov-file#privacy-and-security-concerns https://github.com/did-method-plc/did-method-plc?tab=readme-...). There are some potential issues (like PLC could choose to deny some operations), and the plan is to upstream PLC into an independent entity so that it isn't tied to Bluesky the company.
- verdverm 1y ago
  How does Meta's adoption of ActivityPub play into the corporation and investors supporting / dominating a protocol in the long run?
- qwm 1y ago
  Anything that is funded by venture capital WILL become worse. You can complain all you want about things that don't have infinite funding having issues, but they'll probably just stay at the same level or get slightly better over time. VC-backend companies only get worse after their early peak.
danabramov 1y ago
>I suspect that the cost of running AT proto servers/relays is prohibitive for smaller players compared to a Mastadon server selectively syndicating with a few peers, but I say this with only a vague understanding of the internals of both of these ecosystems. This isn't quite right. ATProto has a completely different "shape" so it's hard to make apples-to-apples comparison. Roughly speaking, you can think of Mastodon as a bunch of little independently hosted copies of Twitter that "email" (loosely speaking) each other to propagate information that isn't on your server. So it's cheap to run a server for a bunch of friends but it's cut off from what's happening in the world. Your identity is tied to your server (that's your webapp), and when you want to follow someone on another server, your server essentially asks that other server to send stuff to yours. This means that by default your view of the network is extremely fragmented — replies, threads, like counts are all desynchronized and partial[1] depending on which server you're looking from and which information is being forwarded to it. ATProto, on the other hand, is designed with a goal of actually being competitive with centralized services. This means that it's partitioned differently – it's not "many Twitters talking to each other" which is Mastodon's model. Instead, in ATProto, there is a separation of concerns: you have swappable hosting (your hosting is the source of truth for your data like posts, likes, follows, etc) and you have applications (which aggregate data from the former). This might remind you of traditional web: it's like every social media user posts JSON to "their own website" (i.e. hosting) while apps aggregate all that data, similar to how Google Reader might aggregate RSS. As a result, in ATProto, the default behavior is that everyone operates with a shared view of the world — you always see all replies, all comments, all likes are counted, etc. It's not partial by default. With this difference in mind, "decentralizing" ATProto is sort of multidimensional. In Mastodon, the only primitive is an "instance" — i.e. an entire Twitter-like webapp you can host for your users. But in ATProto, there are multiple decentralized primitives: - PDS (personal data hosting) is application-agnostic data store. Bluesky's implementation is open source (it uses sqlite database per user). There are also alternative implementations for the same protocol. Bluesky the company does operate the largest ones. However, running a PDS for yourself is extremely cheap (like maybe $1/mo?). It's basically just a structured KV JSON storage organized as a Merkle tree. A bit like Git hosting. - AppViews are actual "application backends". Bluesky operates the bsky.app appview, i.e. what people know as the Bluesky app. Importantly, in ATProto, there is no reason for everyone to run their own AppView. You can run one (and it costs about $300/mo to run a Bluesky AppView ingesting all data currently on the network in real time if you want to do that). Of course, if you were happy with tradeoffs chosen by Mastodon (partial view of the network, you only see what your servers' users follow), you could run that for a lot cheaper — so that's why I'm saying it's not apples-to-apples. ATProto makes it easy to have an actually cohesive experience on the network but the costs are usually being compared with fragmented experience of Mastodon. ATProto can scale down to Mastodon-like UX (with Mastodon-like costs) but it's just not very appealing when you can have the real thing. - Relays are things "in between" PDS's and AppViews. Essentially a Relay is just an optimization to avoid many-to-many connections between AppViews and PDS's. A Relay just rebroadcasts updates from all PDS's as a single stream (that AppViews can subscribe to). Running a Relay used to be expensive but it got a lot cheaper since "Sync 1.1" (when a change in protocol allowed Relays to be non-archiving). Now it costs about $30/mo to run a Relay. So all in all, running PDSs and Relays is cheap. Running full AppViews is more expensive but there's simply no equivalent to that in the Mastodon world because Mastodon is always fragmented[1]. And running a partial AppView (comparable to Mastodon behavior) should be much, much cheaper — but also not very appealing so I don't know anyone who's actually doing that. (It would also require adding a bit of code to filter out the stuff you don't care about.) [1] Mastodon is adding a workaround for this with on-demand fetching, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45078133 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45078133 for my questions about that; in any case, this is limited by what you can do on-demand in a pull-based decentralized system.
kyle-rb 1y ago
Running a PDS server for yourself and a few friends is not very expensive afaik, but there's also not much benefit to doing so, because the point of the PDS is to have a clean separation between your own data and the rest of the network. The expensive things in ATProto are the Relay (crawls/listens to PDSs to produce the firehose) and the AppView (keeps a DB of all posts/likes/etc to serve users' requests). Expensive at scale anyway; if you want your own small network for hosting non-Bluesky posts (like WhiteWind's longer character limit), the event volume will be manageable. For a lot of stuff though ATProto is built in a way that you shouldn't have to host your own; you can implement your own algorithmic feed that reads from the Bluesky Relay's firehose, or your own frontend that still gets data from the Bluesky AppView.
- danabramov 1y ago
  Running a relay is not expensive anymore (it used to be), with recent changes it's about $30/mo. Running an AppView that ingests all ongoing Bluesky traffic (and puts it into database) is more expensive ($300/mo currently) but if you were happy with a partial view of the network, you could get it down by a lot.
  - mxuribe 1y ago
    I'm admittedly not versed in the AT protocol, but $30/month is high for me. Something like $10/month is quite fair, and i would expect should be more than enough for a VPS to host my and 2 other members of my family for any social network service...This $10/month is overkill for other servers on the ActivityPub via say gotosocial, pleroma, etc. Not that ActivityPub is perfect or anything like that, i just mean that $30/month is not yet what i would call a sweet spot for self-hosting something...but of course, that is absolutely leagues better than any cost that the bluesky team or other bigger players would naturally have to pay for ongoing infra., etc. Then again, i will not deny that there's also the possibility that i am simply cheap! :-)
    - edavis 1y ago
      An important note here is the $30/mo is for the relay which is _not_ something the average user will ever need to run Instead, you're looking for hosting a PDS which you absolutely can do for $10/mo (or less) I run a PDS on a OVH Cloud VPS for $5/mo for myself, some alts, and some bots
dom96 1y ago
> BlueSky (for the average user) is pretty much a drop in replacement for Twitter. One reason Bluesky is so successful is because it doesn't shove decentralisation into the user's face like Mastodon does. The vast majority of people don't know what decentralisation is and don't care to. I think that far too much effort is put into decentralisation and not enough into good moderation on these platforms.
- N_Lens 1y ago
  Moderation is definitely Fediverse’s weakness.
  - verdverm 1y ago
    https://roost.tools https://roost.tools is working on open-source options for both social (fedi or not) and beyond social. Generally the idea is that we can fight the bad things better if we are working together instead of independently ATProto's Stacked Moderation is an interesting approach to combine platform, community, and user level choices https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-12-2024-stackable-moderation https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-12-2024-stackable-moderati...
  - shadowgovt 1y ago
    I'm curious if you could expand on this observation? I've heard this from other Mastodon users but I haven't seen it myself; I wonder if it varies heavily from server to server or if I've just gotten lucky.
    - neltnerb 1y ago
      Moderation (the intent and success) varies to such a huge extent that it's practically silly to talk about moderation on Mastodon unless you mean moderation on a specific mastodon server (like mastodon.social). But moderation (the process) is intense and servers are usually community run on the change found in a spare couch (i.e. they're volunteers). I think they do quite well considering the disparate resource levels, but some servers are effectively unmoderated while others are very comfortable; plenty are racist or other types of bigot friendly, but the infrastructure for server-level blocks is ad-hoc. Yet it still seems to work better than you'd guess. Decentralization means whomever runs the server could be great, could just not be good at running a server, could be a religious fundamentalist, a literal cop, a literal communist, a literal nazi, etc etc. And all have different ideas of what needs moderating. There is no mechanism to enforce that "fediverse wide" other than ad-hoc efforts on top of the system.
epcoa 1y ago
> Despite the smaller total numbers in Mastadon, it's great to see that the ecosystem seems to be successfully avoiding centralization But since essentially no one is using it doesn’t suggest much avoidance of centralization. These factors are not independent. It’s pretty easy to avoid anything when your total user count is a rounding error compared to the alternatives.
- yborg 1y ago
  Bluesky user count is the same order of magnitude as Mastodon and is centralized. I think your argument is actually that if you are on a minority platform your wants and needs for how that platform operates are irrelevant. I suppose that's true if you aren't on the platform, but I don't think it's true if you are.
grishka 1y ago
This is due to different design goals. Bluesky's architecture was pretty much dictated by the premise that anyone needs to be able to see any post on the entire system, regardless of whether they have any connections with the author. That algorithmic entertainment-style feeds need to exist. You do need that firehose and other expensive infrastructure for that, there's no going around it. The fediverse, on the other hand, entirely relies on people following each other. Each server only receives and stores data that is relevant to its users. ActivityPub works like an automated email list management system. You follow someone, they start sending you their updates and forwarding any updates from others that they consider relevant, like replies to their posts.
- Merovius 1y ago
  > Bluesky's architecture was pretty much dictated by the premise that anyone needs to be able to see any post on the entire system, regardless of whether they have any connections with the author. That algorithmic entertainment-style feeds need to exist. You do need that firehose and other expensive infrastructure for that, there's no going around it. Exactly this (that people want it at least - I don't think that means it needs to exist). And I think there would be a lot less frustration in the discourse of ActivityPub vs. ATproto, if we could collectively agree that you can't get this in a decentralized system. In a dense network, the number of edges scales with the square of the number of nodes. It's just not feasible to have a network that is both dense and has a large number of nodes. I think "I prioritize virality, recommendation engines and network density, thus accept giving control over the network to a centralized and profit-oriented entity" is an entirely reasonable tradeoff to make. I just don't understand why BlueSky users don't seem to accept that it's the tradeoff they are making.
  - galactus 1y ago
    absolutely. it’s even in the design paper, when they discuss the AppView the authors say it’s “less decentralized than alternatives” and yet you can’t say that without bsky fans getting mad.
- qwm 1y ago
  I think the Twitter format sucks in both cases, but having central, algorithmically-curated feeds are just bad for people psychologically. They just created another Twitter clone with the same problems. The only difference is fewer "nazis".

by d4mi3n 1y ago

isodev 1y ago

ATProto also has the downside of being supported by a corporation and investors with various backgrounds that will eventually want to earn something out of it all and there is no telling how this will happen.

gary_0 1y ago
There are lots of ways they could make a sustainable income without disrupting Bluesky's current status quo and be comfortably rich for the rest of their lives... but that's completely out of character for them and will never happen. I do think the geeks currently running Bluesky are sincere in keeping it decentralized, but the money people will someday probably force them out and squeeze the user base for a quick buck. A hardcore nerd minority will splinter off, though, and keep the decentralized version running, so whatever. History repeats. Frog swims, scorpion stings.
- robertlagrant 1y ago
  Is it a quick buck? How long has bluesky been funded for with no return?
  - gary_0 1y ago
    I meant "quick buck" like flooding the place with ads, tracking, dark patterns, closing the API/protocol, or doing some sort of crypto scam, with no regard for the platform's long-term health. It's been funded for a few years? That's not really that long for such a small team. But I have no idea how their investors think it might make "Facebook money", and isn't that always the goal?
  - Dylan16807 1y ago
    Quick meaning it's short term from when it starts. The time before it starts doesn't factor in.
    - robertlagrant 1y ago
      A quick buck would be the time from when you put your money in to when you get back your money and a profit.
      - Dylan16807 1y ago
        If you have a sudden massive change in plans like this, it resets the timer. You were doing long term, but now you want a quick buck and you don't care much if the company survives. If I set up a get rich quick scheme based on overhyping and selling land, it doesn't matter whether I buy the land today or it's land I had for decades for a completely different reason. Either way I'm going for a quick buck now.
        robertlagrant 1y ago
        But they didn't have this for completely different reasons. They invested money years ago, that they could've bought government bonds with and just earned interest, and instead it went into BlueSky. At some point they'd like a return that would substantially beat the government bond they could've invested in with zero risk.
        Dylan16807 1y ago
        They invested for the long term. If they suddenly want the company to go all-in on short term profit extraction that is a big change in plan.
        robertlagrant 1y ago
        I agree, but I doubt from their perspective it's a quick buck. I appreciate from the perspective of people who got a free service and it's now getting monetised it might feel quick, but surely not surprising at some point. And they got a quick buck up front from not having to pay for the service, which is nice :)
- YetAnotherNick 1y ago
  > There are lots of ways they could make a sustainable income without disrupting Bluesky's current status quo Like what?
  - gary_0 1y ago
    Off the top of my head: Paid hosting/services on top of the protocol, reddit-gold style tipping and gamification, being a transactional middleman (there are a lot of artists selling things, famous people promoting things, and so on), promoted posts and ads (easily blockable, but some users wouldn't bother). Bluesky is a small team of like ~30 people, if they keep running lean they have at least a chance of a decent profit margin. But none of that will make anyone a multi-billionaire, so never mind.
    - YetAnotherNick 1y ago
      I think you are wildly overestimating the user's willingness to pay online, and underestimating the costs to run a large scale site. Even if you remove developer's salaries and server costs, the fines could be worth 10s of millions of dollar per country just for delay in removal of hate speech[1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Enforcement_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Enforcement_Act
    - miki123211 1y ago
      They could also follow the Gmail playbook. For consumers, plenty of ads and plenty of tracking. For businesses, heavily-restricted user-to-server APIs and features gated behind subscriptions, think custom domains with Bsky hosting, multi-user post approvals, integrating DMs with customer support systems etc. You can do all of that while still being fair to and interoperable with the rest of the ecosystem. As long as you don't want the convenience, features and UI of Gmail, you can still communicate with Gmail users from any other provider, and the same could be true about Bsky.
- beeflet 1y ago
  >There are lots of ways they could make a sustainable income without disrupting Bluesky's current status quo and be comfortably rich for the rest of their lives... but that's completely out of character for them and will never happen. Sounds like reddit 15 years ago
Matl 1y ago
ATProto also currently effectively relies on https://web.plc.directory https://web.plc.directory which is a centralized service, making the protocol effectively centralized.
- danabramov 1y ago
  This is true but it's worth noting that (1) the entire point of this node is to be globally agreed on since it's the root of the identity mechanism, (2) it is auditable (https://github.com/did-method-plc/did-method-plc?tab=readme-ov-file#audit-logs https://github.com/did-method-plc/did-method-plc?tab=readme-...) and operations themselves are self-certifying (https://github.com/did-method-plc/did-method-plc?tab=readme-ov-file#privacy-and-security-concerns https://github.com/did-method-plc/did-method-plc?tab=readme-...). There are some potential issues (like PLC could choose to deny some operations), and the plan is to upstream PLC into an independent entity so that it isn't tied to Bluesky the company.
verdverm 1y ago
How does Meta's adoption of ActivityPub play into the corporation and investors supporting / dominating a protocol in the long run?
qwm 1y ago
Anything that is funded by venture capital WILL become worse. You can complain all you want about things that don't have infinite funding having issues, but they'll probably just stay at the same level or get slightly better over time. VC-backend companies only get worse after their early peak.

danabramov 1y ago

>I suspect that the cost of running AT proto servers/relays is prohibitive for smaller players compared to a Mastadon server selectively syndicating with a few peers, but I say this with only a vague understanding of the internals of both of these ecosystems. This isn't quite right. ATProto has a completely different "shape" so it's hard to make apples-to-apples comparison. Roughly speaking, you can think of Mastodon as a bunch of little independently hosted copies of Twitter that "email" (loosely speaking) each other to propagate information that isn't on your server. So it's cheap to run a server for a bunch of friends but it's cut off from what's happening in the world. Your identity is tied to your server (that's your webapp), and when you want to follow someone on another server, your server essentially asks that other server to send stuff to yours. This means that by default your view of the network is extremely fragmented — replies, threads, like counts are all desynchronized and partial[1] depending on which server you're looking from and which information is being forwarded to it. ATProto, on the other hand, is designed with a goal of actually being competitive with centralized services. This means that it's partitioned differently – it's not "many Twitters talking to each other" which is Mastodon's model. Instead, in ATProto, there is a separation of concerns: you have swappable hosting (your hosting is the source of truth for your data like posts, likes, follows, etc) and you have applications (which aggregate data from the former). This might remind you of traditional web: it's like every social media user posts JSON to "their own website" (i.e. hosting) while apps aggregate all that data, similar to how Google Reader might aggregate RSS. As a result, in ATProto, the default behavior is that everyone operates with a shared view of the world — you always see all replies, all comments, all likes are counted, etc. It's not partial by default. With this difference in mind, "decentralizing" ATProto is sort of multidimensional. In Mastodon, the only primitive is an "instance" — i.e. an entire Twitter-like webapp you can host for your users. But in ATProto, there are multiple decentralized primitives: - PDS (personal data hosting) is application-agnostic data store. Bluesky's implementation is open source (it uses sqlite database per user). There are also alternative implementations for the same protocol. Bluesky the company does operate the largest ones. However, running a PDS for yourself is extremely cheap (like maybe $1/mo?). It's basically just a structured KV JSON storage organized as a Merkle tree. A bit like Git hosting. - AppViews are actual "application backends". Bluesky operates the bsky.app appview, i.e. what people know as the Bluesky app. Importantly, in ATProto, there is no reason for everyone to run their own AppView. You can run one (and it costs about $300/mo to run a Bluesky AppView ingesting all data currently on the network in real time if you want to do that). Of course, if you were happy with tradeoffs chosen by Mastodon (partial view of the network, you only see what your servers' users follow), you could run that for a lot cheaper — so that's why I'm saying it's not apples-to-apples. ATProto makes it easy to have an actually cohesive experience on the network but the costs are usually being compared with fragmented experience of Mastodon. ATProto can scale down to Mastodon-like UX (with Mastodon-like costs) but it's just not very appealing when you can have the real thing. - Relays are things "in between" PDS's and AppViews. Essentially a Relay is just an optimization to avoid many-to-many connections between AppViews and PDS's. A Relay just rebroadcasts updates from all PDS's as a single stream (that AppViews can subscribe to). Running a Relay used to be expensive but it got a lot cheaper since "Sync 1.1" (when a change in protocol allowed Relays to be non-archiving). Now it costs about $30/mo to run a Relay. So all in all, running PDSs and Relays is cheap. Running full AppViews is more expensive but there's simply no equivalent to that in the Mastodon world because Mastodon is always fragmented[1]. And running a partial AppView (comparable to Mastodon behavior) should be much, much cheaper — but also not very appealing so I don't know anyone who's actually doing that. (It would also require adding a bit of code to filter out the stuff you don't care about.) [1] Mastodon is adding a workaround for this with on-demand fetching, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45078133 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45078133 for my questions about that; in any case, this is limited by what you can do on-demand in a pull-based decentralized system.

kyle-rb 1y ago

Running a PDS server for yourself and a few friends is not very expensive afaik, but there's also not much benefit to doing so, because the point of the PDS is to have a clean separation between your own data and the rest of the network. The expensive things in ATProto are the Relay (crawls/listens to PDSs to produce the firehose) and the AppView (keeps a DB of all posts/likes/etc to serve users' requests). Expensive at scale anyway; if you want your own small network for hosting non-Bluesky posts (like WhiteWind's longer character limit), the event volume will be manageable. For a lot of stuff though ATProto is built in a way that you shouldn't have to host your own; you can implement your own algorithmic feed that reads from the Bluesky Relay's firehose, or your own frontend that still gets data from the Bluesky AppView.

danabramov 1y ago
Running a relay is not expensive anymore (it used to be), with recent changes it's about $30/mo. Running an AppView that ingests all ongoing Bluesky traffic (and puts it into database) is more expensive ($300/mo currently) but if you were happy with a partial view of the network, you could get it down by a lot.
- mxuribe 1y ago
  I'm admittedly not versed in the AT protocol, but $30/month is high for me. Something like $10/month is quite fair, and i would expect should be more than enough for a VPS to host my and 2 other members of my family for any social network service...This $10/month is overkill for other servers on the ActivityPub via say gotosocial, pleroma, etc. Not that ActivityPub is perfect or anything like that, i just mean that $30/month is not yet what i would call a sweet spot for self-hosting something...but of course, that is absolutely leagues better than any cost that the bluesky team or other bigger players would naturally have to pay for ongoing infra., etc. Then again, i will not deny that there's also the possibility that i am simply cheap! :-)
  - edavis 1y ago
    An important note here is the $30/mo is for the relay which is _not_ something the average user will ever need to run Instead, you're looking for hosting a PDS which you absolutely can do for $10/mo (or less) I run a PDS on a OVH Cloud VPS for $5/mo for myself, some alts, and some bots

dom96 1y ago

> BlueSky (for the average user) is pretty much a drop in replacement for Twitter. One reason Bluesky is so successful is because it doesn't shove decentralisation into the user's face like Mastodon does. The vast majority of people don't know what decentralisation is and don't care to. I think that far too much effort is put into decentralisation and not enough into good moderation on these platforms.

N_Lens 1y ago
Moderation is definitely Fediverse’s weakness.
- verdverm 1y ago
  https://roost.tools https://roost.tools is working on open-source options for both social (fedi or not) and beyond social. Generally the idea is that we can fight the bad things better if we are working together instead of independently ATProto's Stacked Moderation is an interesting approach to combine platform, community, and user level choices https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-12-2024-stackable-moderation https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-12-2024-stackable-moderati...
- shadowgovt 1y ago
  I'm curious if you could expand on this observation? I've heard this from other Mastodon users but I haven't seen it myself; I wonder if it varies heavily from server to server or if I've just gotten lucky.
  - neltnerb 1y ago
    Moderation (the intent and success) varies to such a huge extent that it's practically silly to talk about moderation on Mastodon unless you mean moderation on a specific mastodon server (like mastodon.social). But moderation (the process) is intense and servers are usually community run on the change found in a spare couch (i.e. they're volunteers). I think they do quite well considering the disparate resource levels, but some servers are effectively unmoderated while others are very comfortable; plenty are racist or other types of bigot friendly, but the infrastructure for server-level blocks is ad-hoc. Yet it still seems to work better than you'd guess. Decentralization means whomever runs the server could be great, could just not be good at running a server, could be a religious fundamentalist, a literal cop, a literal communist, a literal nazi, etc etc. And all have different ideas of what needs moderating. There is no mechanism to enforce that "fediverse wide" other than ad-hoc efforts on top of the system.

epcoa 1y ago

> Despite the smaller total numbers in Mastadon, it's great to see that the ecosystem seems to be successfully avoiding centralization But since essentially no one is using it doesn’t suggest much avoidance of centralization. These factors are not independent. It’s pretty easy to avoid anything when your total user count is a rounding error compared to the alternatives.

yborg 1y ago
Bluesky user count is the same order of magnitude as Mastodon and is centralized. I think your argument is actually that if you are on a minority platform your wants and needs for how that platform operates are irrelevant. I suppose that's true if you aren't on the platform, but I don't think it's true if you are.

grishka 1y ago

This is due to different design goals. Bluesky's architecture was pretty much dictated by the premise that anyone needs to be able to see any post on the entire system, regardless of whether they have any connections with the author. That algorithmic entertainment-style feeds need to exist. You do need that firehose and other expensive infrastructure for that, there's no going around it. The fediverse, on the other hand, entirely relies on people following each other. Each server only receives and stores data that is relevant to its users. ActivityPub works like an automated email list management system. You follow someone, they start sending you their updates and forwarding any updates from others that they consider relevant, like replies to their posts.

Merovius 1y ago
> Bluesky's architecture was pretty much dictated by the premise that anyone needs to be able to see any post on the entire system, regardless of whether they have any connections with the author. That algorithmic entertainment-style feeds need to exist. You do need that firehose and other expensive infrastructure for that, there's no going around it. Exactly this (that people want it at least - I don't think that means it needs to exist). And I think there would be a lot less frustration in the discourse of ActivityPub vs. ATproto, if we could collectively agree that you can't get this in a decentralized system. In a dense network, the number of edges scales with the square of the number of nodes. It's just not feasible to have a network that is both dense and has a large number of nodes. I think "I prioritize virality, recommendation engines and network density, thus accept giving control over the network to a centralized and profit-oriented entity" is an entirely reasonable tradeoff to make. I just don't understand why BlueSky users don't seem to accept that it's the tradeoff they are making.
- galactus 1y ago
  absolutely. it’s even in the design paper, when they discuss the AppView the authors say it’s “less decentralized than alternatives” and yet you can’t say that without bsky fans getting mad.
qwm 1y ago
I think the Twitter format sucks in both cases, but having central, algorithmically-curated feeds are just bad for people psychologically. They just created another Twitter clone with the same problems. The only difference is fewer "nazis".