I still don't comprehend why Dorsey didn't just try to make the largest ActivityPub server on the web. Instead we get a haphazard rewrite of everything ActivityPub has already solved and a zany "you need an invite to get into this club" airdrop that feels dated to gmail 20 years ago. The service feels too much like "Elon bought Twitter, now we need to make Twitter again". That Dorsey is the principal investor makes it hard to think that it is anything else.
The only market it seems to be gaining traction in from my perspective is millennials who have nostalgia for old Twitter -- and as someone who grew up with old Twitter, I can say I don't really miss it.
Yeah, I have read about the things they want to do which are mostly cryptography related and which have absolutely zero reasoning as to _why_ they can't be done with ActivityPub. Signing all your messages? Yeah, you can append Ed25519 signature chains to any ActivityPub message. You could publish your base public key when creating an account. You could make software that hides all this beneath an abstraction layer so the end-user never has to deal with it. Exporting all your data and uploading it to another server is something you can already do with Mastodon. E2EE message? Coming soon to Mastodon. It's all things you can do _very easily_ on top of a fault tolerant federated public messaging system.
ActivityPub of course uses the same cryptographic certification virtually all the web does, just TLS/HTTPS and relies on the host cert to be valid. But if you wanted to add further levels of verification like pubkeys and sigs, there's absolutely nothing stopping you.
> Instead we get a haphazard rewrite of everything ActivityPub has already solved
As someone who doesn't seem to be a deep into the specifications (ActivityPub nor AT Protocol) as you are, how does ActivityPub handle people moving across servers without loosing old content and interactions? Like if I use server A but want to move to server B, how does that work in practice? How does server C who used to communicate with server A get notified that they now have to communicate with server B instead?
> The service feels too much like "Elon bought Twitter, now we need to make Twitter again"
Strange feeling considering bluesky was first announced in 2019 as a Twitter project, eventually spun out as a separate entity in 2021, and Elon didn't start the acquisition of Twitter until 2022 sometime.
Right now, changing accounts is implemented by the old server sending a Move activity which tells all your followers where your new account is. This doesn't handle moving any content.
But, there's nothing fundamental about ActivityPub that prevents this: https://shadowfacts.net/2023/activitypub-portable-identity/. You can absolutely have posts identified by your identity (read: domain) rather than where they're hosted. Complete and seamless moves are possible, Mastodon just doesn't implement them.
The old server broadcasts a 'this person has moved'-message. Your followers will then automatically switch over to the new account.
This implies that:
- If the old server is offline or unwilling, you cannot move
- Your old toots and interactions will still be tied to the old address, so you leave those behind.
There is some talk going on to find ways to mitigate this and it might be possible to fix the second issue.
The first issue is a bit trickier though. If you were to remove trust from the server, it becomes way harder to fight spam.
Guess my post was too much of truth to handle, but I guess that’s just a proof of what I’ve said, at the end, I’m happy that social media is dying in its current form.
Who runs the BGS? It’s the most expensive part, a few “centralized” providers will run this? What if BGS injects its own filtering? Honestly this sounds like a more complicated way of implementing centralization
Effectively yes. It's roughly a giant follow bot, run by those with the resources to do so. If you don't like its filtering, I guess you'd switch to another more to your liking.
> The BGS handles "big-world" networking. It crawls the network, gathering as much data as it can, and outputs it in one big stream for other services to use. It’s analogous to a firehose provider or a super-powered relay node.
I think we should abandon whole idea of feed. Instead give me people/account/tag specific feed like Instagram or WhatsApp stories. With this I choose what I want to see. It would drastically reduce noise and my time on platform. The platform should be delight to use not something that is constantly trying to suck me into drama.
This would also eliminate need of Big Graph Services.
I think it is possible for a non-profit, non-commercial (and probably open source) social network platform to produce an 'algorithmic feed' that is some degree of 'good'. As you allude to, existing companies are incentivised to drive engagement by sucking you into some kind of drama to pump ad impressions.
I believe that a platform which doesn't have such financial incentives could produce a different spin on an algorithmic feed which isn't as unhealthy.
I also believe it should always be optional, and transparent. I probably wouldn't want to use it - I'm only interested in what the people i explicitly follow have to say.
Can you also prevent the BGS from scraping your server? What if I don't want to pay the networking bill they would cause? How is the BGS going to pay for sending out the firehose to all the listeners?
It's still unclear to me how the federated economics will work out
It is my understanding that the at protocol has the building blocks for alot of these use cases as well. So while yes bluesky the app is just a micro blogging social media, the protocol should be able to do the rest.
I frankly don’t care, and hope all “social media” are just like HN style, a thread about specific thing, and people discuss it, none of the crap of “content creators” or similar grifters, I also think personally youtube was ruined when it has all of those creators after it monetized the platform.
Same style not an identical one, where your contents are in the platform itself, not just a link, similar to old forums style where you write whatever you want and people discuss it back.
And imagine if every time there was a comment about not liking ice cream some people had to comment that they don’t like a comment that don’t like ice cream.
I think the federation part of this post is kinda ill-written. BGS is more of a proxy for messages in PDS, and not critical for federation itself. It's something additional to the federation network, but still necessary to build a user-friendly application. In other words, it belongs to application layer, which is above the federation layer. I'm pretty sure this is the intent of the design.
And yeah, for sure the only reason people outside of bluesky cannot see the content is because they're still figuring out how to actually serve image bytes over HTTP, which turned out to be a technically difficult problem that there is no prior research about.
If you dont mind using the console apps, it seems like you are able to query from gosky and slurp all(?) of the data with the bigsky app. Im not sure if that is intended though. I dont even have an account or invite code yet -- just on my local server.
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The only market it seems to be gaining traction in from my perspective is millennials who have nostalgia for old Twitter -- and as someone who grew up with old Twitter, I can say I don't really miss it.
Have you seen the ecosystem study BlueSky published in 2020? https://gitlab.com/bluesky-community1/decentralized-ecosyste...
Bit more of a summary https://twitter.com/bluesky/status/1511811083954102273
BlueSky/AT Protocol seems to have pretty distinct design goals that are not possible with ActivityPub.
ActivityPub of course uses the same cryptographic certification virtually all the web does, just TLS/HTTPS and relies on the host cert to be valid. But if you wanted to add further levels of verification like pubkeys and sigs, there's absolutely nothing stopping you.
As someone who doesn't seem to be a deep into the specifications (ActivityPub nor AT Protocol) as you are, how does ActivityPub handle people moving across servers without loosing old content and interactions? Like if I use server A but want to move to server B, how does that work in practice? How does server C who used to communicate with server A get notified that they now have to communicate with server B instead?
> The service feels too much like "Elon bought Twitter, now we need to make Twitter again"
Strange feeling considering bluesky was first announced in 2019 as a Twitter project, eventually spun out as a separate entity in 2021, and Elon didn't start the acquisition of Twitter until 2022 sometime.
But, there's nothing fundamental about ActivityPub that prevents this: https://shadowfacts.net/2023/activitypub-portable-identity/. You can absolutely have posts identified by your identity (read: domain) rather than where they're hosted. Complete and seamless moves are possible, Mastodon just doesn't implement them.
This implies that:
- If the old server is offline or unwilling, you cannot move - Your old toots and interactions will still be tied to the old address, so you leave those behind.
There is some talk going on to find ways to mitigate this and it might be possible to fix the second issue.
The first issue is a bit trickier though. If you were to remove trust from the server, it becomes way harder to fight spam.
Because that would just restart at square one? It's like we've learned nothing about centralization since the web1 era.
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I think we should abandon whole idea of feed. Instead give me people/account/tag specific feed like Instagram or WhatsApp stories. With this I choose what I want to see. It would drastically reduce noise and my time on platform. The platform should be delight to use not something that is constantly trying to suck me into drama.
This would also eliminate need of Big Graph Services.
I believe that a platform which doesn't have such financial incentives could produce a different spin on an algorithmic feed which isn't as unhealthy.
I also believe it should always be optional, and transparent. I probably wouldn't want to use it - I'm only interested in what the people i explicitly follow have to say.
It's still unclear to me how the federated economics will work out
- Decentralized email (with a gateway to legacy email via the @freenet.org domain)
- Decentralized microblogging (think Twitter or Facebook)
- Instant Messaging (Whatsapp, Signal)
- Online Store (Amazon)
- Discussion (Reddit, HN)
- Video discovery (Youtube, TikTok)
- Search (Google, Bing)
Bluesky is just a decentralised social media.
https://imgur.com/a/ILAK4Ms
Not much to it really.
And yeah, for sure the only reason people outside of bluesky cannot see the content is because they're still figuring out how to actually serve image bytes over HTTP, which turned out to be a technically difficult problem that there is no prior research about.