cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/24751597
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/24748390
https://bsky.app/profile/freeourfeeds.com/post/3lfmvqip7zk2v
tldr, it’s a new foundation launching with an open letter signed by:
Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia
Shoshana Zuboff, Professor Emerita, Harvard Business School and author of ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’
Mark Ruffalo, Actor
Alex Winter, Actor and filmmaker
Audrey Tang, Former Minister of Digital Affairs, Taiwan
Roger McNamee, Businessman and author of ‘Zucked’
Brian Eno, Musician
Carole Cadwalladr, Investigative journalist
Cory Doctorow, Blogger and journalist
Akilah Hughes, Writer and comedian
Sebastian Soriano, Former Chairman, Arcep
Rosie Boycott, Member, UK House of Lords
Alexandra Geese, Member of the European Parliament, Greens/EFA
…
Bluesky has expressed a clear interest in public governance of the protocol they have developed. We are establishing a Foundation to help steward this process, to ensure that the AT Protocol remains capture-resistant and is instead governed in line with a thriving public interest and open community.
Or maybe, maybe, join the fediverse instead of yet another corporate media.
Is there any instance other than Bluesky where people can register?
Is there any instance other than Bluesky where people can register?
There aren’t “instances” in the ActivityPub sense, where “instance” means single point of failure you’re married to (its name is literally part of your identity) which is simultaneously responsible for keeping your data available and curating your view of the rest of the network; AT Protocol decomposes these responsibilities so that they can be delegated independently to different operators.
See https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/federation-architecture and https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/ for details.
There are many people running their own Personal Data Servers, AppViews, Labelers, and Feed Generators, but I’m not aware of anybody else running a large-scale Relay yet (which is one of the things this new foundation says they are planning to work on). I’m also not sure if you can actually create a
did:plcusing a self-hosted AppView or if maybe you need to usedid:webto create a new identity without using their AppView currently.I’m not aware of anybody else running a large-scale Relay yet (which is one of the things this new foundation says they are planning to work on).
The fact that there still isn’t any other relay besides thé Bluesky one isn’t a good sign. If cost of running it is so high, how are enthusiast supposed to be able to run their own, and thus “own the town square”?
They can’t. At some point you have to wonder if this is a feature not a bug. You’ll always be beholden to the largesse of millionaires. Whether that’s a charity or not.
There are multiple other relays running, and its pretty cheap nowadays, lowest I’ve seen is someone running a full network non-archive relay for 23usd/month
Very interesting, thanks! Is it possible for people to register on that relay?
Very interesting, thanks! Is it possible for people to register on that relay?
(if I understand correctly) you don’t register on a relay, you register on a PDS (which you can easily self-host on a small computer at home). But, to register with a PDS, you need a DID, and to interoperate with the rest of bluesky it needs to be using one of their two currently-supported DID methods: either did:web or did:plc. The former is a thing which you can create using a domain you control, which gives you an identity that you lose control of when you lose control of that domain. The latter is the actually-centralized “placeholder” DID method implemented by an append-only log operated by BlueSky PBC, which is what most people are actually using. I’m not sure if/how you can create a
did:plcwithout first creating an account on a bsky.app PDS, but you can migrate it to your own PDS after creating one there. or, you can usedid:weband rely on your domain name registration instead of their centralized log.Further reading:
- How to self-host all of Bluesky except the AppView (for now) (from November last year)
- minimal AppView example
- “self-hosting entire bluesky” with docker-compose (including AppView, apparently)
Bluesky. “We datamine, you pay the bills”
Looking at names I can see them making feeds free like openai is making ai open.
Isnt Bluesky like duplicative of what the Feddy is going for?
Theoretically, not really. Realistically, no not at all. My understanding, being corporately backed. They want every server to host everything. So that they theoretically have access to everything to datamine and advertise on. In the fediverse. You can see and interact with all the content. But your server doesn’t aggregate it unless you interact. Someone correct me if I am wrong.
Basically what this means, is that you could spin up and host your mastodon or Lemmy server on an SBC laying in a drawer spare. Somewhat like Action Retro did with bitbang.social. If you want to run a bsky server. Theoretically you can. You will just need quite a lot of storage, bandwidth, and server hardware. Activity Pub is decentralized. The AT protocol technically can be decentralized in a way. But not really.
they didn’t do it that way for no reason though, and they did do some stuff to alleviate the problems it causes.
- it allows for better discoverability, no missing comments in threads, good global search, ect. Basically solves most all of the papercuts the fediverse has.
- there isn’t a “server” you host, per se. There are 3 components, the appview (ui, self-explanatory) and decides how your algorithm is, the relay (hard to run, does the federation and outputs everything it sees as a “firehose”) and the pds (personal data server), which hosts account data and is the “home” for your account. I host my own pds, and you can migrate your account between pds’s. The only hard part to run is the relay.
also everything bluesky is open source
The thing is, the discoverability issue on the fediverse disappears if we stop treating it like it’s a centealized space. Everything looks the same, and everything uses the visual language of centralized social media. And we encourage people to “join Mastodon” or “join Lemmy”, which is like saying “join WordPress” and “join Joomla”.
We need to be promoting specific websites that people can join, for the reason of wanting to communicate with people on those websites. We need to treat federation as a value-add, not the whole damn value proposition.
Until we do, we’re just going to be navel gazing.
The only hard part to run is the relay.
So what prevents the relay from being bought by a billionaire, who would then decide on the content of the output?
you can just run another one, currently nobody does but if the main relay gets bought out, the community can band together to run one, it’s a couple hundred bucks a month, expensive, but not unsustainable.
Decentralized in theory, but not in practice is just centralized.
Also:
So how challenging is it to run those? In July 2024, running a Relay on ATProto already required 1 terabyte of storage. But more alarmingly, just a four months later in November 2024, running a relay now requires approximately 5 terabytes of storage
Aren’t the top few lemmy servers about that much to run?
No, instances can be run by enthusiasts and keep operating based on donations
https://feddit.org/post/2600584
The likely answer to this is that there will always have to be a large corporation at the heart of Bluesky/ATProto, and the network will have to rely on that corporation to do the work of abuse mitigation, particularly in terms of illegal content and spam. This may be a good enough solution for Bluesky’s purposes, but on the economics alone it’s going to be a centralized system that relies on trusting centralized authorities.
Bluesky is not free 🤷🏻♂️
in what sense
@lig
On several levels, but especially because of this : https://toad.social/@davetroy/113493454665487197
