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This is the part where I gloat about being right about Bluesky, right?

They never really wanted federation.

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in reply to The Gibson

"You can choose any Bluesky federation you want, as long as it's bsky.social"
Unknown parent

c0debabe, mapache
no they never were friendshaped
in reply to The Gibson

As Pratchett said "“Ankh-Morpork had dallied with many forms of government and had ended up with that form of democracy known as One Man, One Vote. The Patrician was the Man; he had the Vote.”
They want federation, one federation, a federation, their federation. The man is Jack and he has the vote.
in reply to The Gibson

@The Gibson I'd be interested in what his definition of "federation" is.
in reply to The Gibson

lol then why try in the first place if you're just gonna half ass it so you can claim atproto is better? clown shoes moment at bluesky engineering
in reply to The Gibson

if you actually go look at the design of atproto, it was never designed to do anything like what we call federation. It was _always_ intended to be one centralized service, and their idea of "federation" is decentralized identities and data management.

Which, yeah, there's a space for that and it would be quite nice to be able to move your entire identity, including all your data, from instance to instance. But ultimately, that idea works because their idea of an "instance" is essentially a singular isolated entity.

in reply to mav :happy_blob:

It's kind of fascinating, actually.
https://bsky.social/about/blog/5-5-2023-federation-architecture

One of their core conceits when designing their idea of how the network should work was intentionally not resilience. It's designed for centralized moderation at huge scale.

What is admittedly interesting is that, if understand correctly, ultimately one PDS could connect to a bunch of different relays, each with different views of its network - since, essentially, the relay *is the entire network.*

The principal issue with this design is that the relay is the entire network.

Which is quite literally not federation, at least in any sense I've been made to understand it. Sure, you could take your ball and go home, by removing your PDS entirely, but you can't cooperate with "some" of the network.

It's a pretty big disappointment really.

in reply to The Gibson

Entirely unsurprising. At best, their “federation” model was never truly federated given that bsky relies on layers that an individual (or even small faction) could never afford to run themselves. So much of the promise of bsky is pure conjecture or fantasy, yet #bluesky superfans will preach about how much better bluesky is than other networks based on where they THINK it will go, not where it is now or more importantly, where it will *actually* go.
Unknown parent

mav :happy_blob:
That actually explains a lot.
in reply to The Gibson

Huh? Very confused what you mean. I don't think "Federation" as a concept is tied to Mastodon-style instances specifically?
in reply to Shreyan Jain

@Shreyan Jain It doesn't have to be, but to my knowledge, BlueSky doesn't support anything that even remotely resembles federation. It's all centrally controlled.
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

@me Don't think that's accurate - for example @mackuba is working on his own AppView, which people will be able to replace api.bsky.app with, for example. Nothing in the network mandates being controlled by Bluesky
in reply to Shreyan Jain

@Shreyan Jain I'll admit to not having heard of this. If I post something using this third-party AppView, who controls the physical disk on which my post resides?

I haven't paid a ton of attention to BlueSky because I'm simply not interested in yet another walled garden.

in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

The "source of truth" for your posts is always your PDS, which some people are already hosting themselves, and some like @shreyan are writing new implementations of; that would be analogous to a post's source in AP being its origin instance. AppViews, relays and other kinds of servers like feed generators all keep their copies. The difference is that instead of reading everything through your instance's copies like in AP, you read everything through the AppView's copies.
This entry was edited (3 weeks ago)
in reply to Shreyan Jain

@shreyan @me Not working just yet, just thinking about it 😀 But this thought keeps coming back, so I probably won't be able to resist forever. (It would probably be much simpler to just install one from Bluesky's existing code, but where's the fun in that? Also, Javascript ughhh)

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