Is there any plan to offload hosting costs to users repos or do the relays have to bear the cost of images / videos ? It just seems very incongruous to me for a decentralized app to suffer from hugs of death like this link is right now. I actually tried to pull this up on the wayback machine but they seem to have only crawled as far as the butterfly logo ? Is this intentional ? I know that bluesky likes to give users control of where their post ends up, maybe they have asked internet archive not to crawl ? [0]
I liked how urbit did it, just paste s3 bucket credentials into the app settings. A - its pretty cheap even for a terabyte of storage, B - it removes liability from the application not having to host user content, C - it increases decentralization, with many hosts in many jurisdictions able to host content.
EDIT: I went to sign up for a new account and right away I'm given the choice to host content on my own server, neat, I think I'll give this a try [1]
The bad crawl for internet archive is because it's a giant SPA. It's a react native codebase which, while irritating for web users, allows us to target all the platforms without building multiple apps. Kind of a life-saver.
Relays actually don't process media; that's up to the applications. We intentionally keep the repo-hosting costs low (and they'll get lower soon) so that self-hosting your data and keypairs remains affordable. Think of the application model as equivalent to a search engine, with the repo-hosts (PDSes) being web servers. That's almost exactly how it works.
The only way decentralization would make a hug of death irrelevant is if the individual nodes weren't processing the full network, in which case you're not getting the global social experience, so.
my thinking wrt hugs of death is that if one host is saturated, the content would be available at another host, such that it's not simply unavailable due to high traffic, but leaving that aside, I'm still unsure which party is delivering content to end users.
If I host gifs at bsky.jazzyjackson.xyz, and my posts are indexed by some number of relays, and finally viewed by bsky or an alternate front end app, is that app mirroring my gifs to shoulder the burden, preventing traffic from hitting my $5 VPS?
I always thought {bit,web}torrent would be a good fit for this problem of mirroring content among multiple hosts, but maybe there's a reason no one has gone down that road.
Servers are holding up so far. Somewhere been 800k-1mm signups (need to check backend). Fortunately we were overprovisioned. If we hit 4mm new signups then things should get interesting.
edit: we did have some degradations (user handles entering an invalid state, firehose crashed a couple times, image servers are giving bad load latencies randomly) but we managed to avoid a full outage.
I left Xitter about 6 weeks ago and went all in on Bluesky. Took time to give feedback to the algo, but it's doing much better these days. I don't feel like I'm missing out on much, you'll get the same news & events on Bluesky. A lot of people who were scared of losing their following are reporting more, better engagement with lower follower counts.
What I really like about it is the ATProto, which while imperfect, seems like the best current design for the next gen of social media built on a federated foundation.
- DID for identity
- PDS for data mobility
- algo feed & moderation choice, you can build your own and anyone on Bluesky can use it (https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-12-2024-stackable-moderati...) If you didn't see, they recently added anti-toxicity features and are looking towards community notes
- Bluesky is the twitter like view, but you can build anything on ATProto and leverage the shared infra
I'm personally working on a "reddit" like view of the Bluesky network. Not a reddit clone, but a different way to organize the same information around topics, news events, and/or links. One could also design their own Lexicon and build something very close to reddit. One of the cool things is that all the objects for all apps are stored into a single SQLite database per user. So if you want to move your data to a different host, all of the apps, content, and connections survive that migration.
That's my favourite thing about it, really. It's very interesting at the technical level, but regular users simply do not need to care about any of that. They're adopting it anyway because it works.
Most other "interesting protocol" projects are used exclusively by interesting-protocol enthusiasts.
Well the normal folks will care when one of the nerds creates something personally useful to them. Then that becomes the killer feature that makes the platform sticky.
Will this happen? No clue but it is cool to see someone innovating in this space. Let’s see what people come up with.
Many non-nerds care about having their own TLD and corresponding email address, yet still use Gmail/GSuite, whether via their webapps or IMAP/CalDav/CardDav.
And arguably the most important thing keeping Google accountable for the quality of their products is the threat of users being able to move out on relatively short notice (i.e. without losing all of your historical inbox content and most importantly people being able to reach you via the identifier they know).
Bluesky seems closest to replicating that to the Twitter-like use case. (Mastodon is severely lacking on both portability of identifiers and portability of data across servers; there really needs to be a lightweight middle ground between self-hosting and complete reliance on somebody else's infrastructure).
Isn't that how most applications start, catering to some piece of the nerdery population? For Facebook, it was university nerds before it started to spread, Twitter just had some subsection of the nerds at first, Mastodon/ActivityPub goes after the decentralized/distributed nerds and Bluesky somewhere in the middle the two latter ones.
I don't think so, you can now run your own PDS with a limited number of users. There was a comment on another recent Bluesky HN story where someone reported that they offer instructions for doing his at sign up, iirc
I want a social network like X/BlueSky but it uses a community notes style algorithm to decide what content to show me instead of raw engagement. Should get rid of the trolls as Paul Graham wants to happen.
What happens when Community Notes gets "gamed" like what supposedly happens sometimes on ...Community Notes?
One example can be that there is a mass attempt at pushing some viewpoint, it may not stick long term but it sticks for the duration of time the content is viewed by the most amount of people. Kind of like how upvote bots mess with Reddit.
I’ve started using it again recently and find it’s improved massively. I can find all the people I want to follow and my feed is much nicer. I see no reason to go back to Twitter.
Several folks in Brazil had much to choose from out of Threads, Mastodon and Bluesky as alternatives to Twitter / X.
Now that X got banned in Brazil and to potentially lose over 100M+ users we are starting to see which platforms they are choosing to sign up to.
So far, Bluesky is seeing a surge in user registrations after the invite system was lifted a year ago. I would expect Threads to also see a surge in registrations as well.
Mastodon however appears not to be even considered as a migration path at all yet, but either way it is still early days for all options.
Mastodon was dead from the start, it isn’t in the running.
Threads has too big of an image problem to overcome. No one wants Instagram for Twitter.
Bluesky is the only platform currently that has a chance, but it’s an under funded, tiny team who can’t ship on time. Bluesky will see a surge in registrations but no change in DAU as they still haven’t supported video, so no one will stay on the site.
I'm looking at one of the Mastodon Users Count bots and it seems like there's a 43% increase in sign-ups per weeks since last week. Of course, I have no idea why and that might be normal noise.
Mastadon is the green ribbon worn by 13 people out of 57 people attending a conference out of 230 million people in that country who were there to condemn, in strong terms, the privatisation of the national health service.
Thread doesn’t stand a chance. I don’t have an Instagram account. So I am not going to create one for Threads. Nope. I know friends and colleagues who detest even the idea of this connection even though they have accounts.
Meta/Fb didn’t create X/Tw competition/alternative. They created an Instagram add-on.
Does bsky stand a chance? Probably? Does ATProto stand a chance? Nope, it doesn’t. Sad, but it doesn’t. It has the same Mastadon problems - not technical but practical.
One of the linked articles said it boiled down to X being ordered to censor political opponents of those in power. They chose not to. I’m glad.
Now, traffic is going to Bluesky. I wonder if this means that Bluesky has or will be offered the same choice. We might see what the character of that organization is by what choice they make.
When Musk is picking-and-choosing where freedom of expression matters (e.g., Turkey, India, publishing his plane's location information, banning users writing "cisgender", etc.), I don't think it's "pro-censorship" to not be on his side here because this doesn't feel motivated by true principle and puts his motives and associated narrative into highly suspect territory for me.
Is some selective censorship from Musk better than nothing? Since his selective censorship appears to be primarily aimed at supporting right-wing causes, I have a hard time feeling like the answer is "yes".
It boiled down to X not taking down accounts associated with individuals with outstanding warrants who were inciting violence. Brazilian law requires X to do so.
The problem with Elon is that he's decided to pick and choose which countries he will comply with local legislation on, and which ones he won't. So India, Turkey, he did. Brazil, he didn't.
Maybe the Supreme Court in Brazil is "wrong" and "corrupt" where legislators in India and Turkey are not, but knowing a fair bit about all three countries, I doubt very much that to be the case. So then it's a business decision -- or more like a "whatever pisses Elon off" decision, which in the end is just as "corrupt" as your typical corrupt dictator who acts on whatever pisses them off.
"censor political opponents" is the most intellectually dishonest take, and in it lies the whole root of the discussion. Said opponents' accounts were asked to be shut down, not because they are opponents, but because they were being used to commit crimes against the electoral justice. The Supreme Court is a lifetime seat meant to not be caught in bi-yearly electoral politics, so it can oversee it, this current judge was the appointed by draw the judge of the whole "fake news inquiry", like every thing at the supreme court, he was also the elected president of the Supreme Court at the time of the previous elections (he was elected president by his colleagues in the supreme court). If the president at the time, or the drawn judge, was to be pro-coup, then we wouldn't have this whole debacle and elon musk would probably be CEO of Brazil at this moment.
Since elon musk became owner of Twitter, brazillian court has struggled significantly more to obtain data from criminal accounts (a famous example being hate speech accounts that were not shut down, nor "doxxed" to the court, since according to twitter the hate speech didn't break TOS), to a point where it became impossible, so the court had to act, this situation has been boiling for a few years with Elon trying to strongarm his will in the country, he raised the bets, STF's called his bluff.
>Said opponents' accounts were asked to be shut down, not because they are opponents, but because they were being used to commit crimes against the electoral justice.
What are the "crimes" they're being accused of? Getting the opposition locked for "crimes" is basically authoritarianism 101. See: Venezuela[1]
I was commenting strictly on what’s in the articles’ links. If he did that, it would be just as deplorable as the censorship they were claiming to oppose.
There was no coup. There was a protest. The protesters wanted the military to enact a coup. And the military did not attempt a coup. You simply cannot claim that elderly people with bibles and flags amounts to a coup or even an attempt at one.
This was discussed at length only two days ago. If you disagree with this, just refer to this comment thread:
Readit News
I liked how urbit did it, just paste s3 bucket credentials into the app settings. A - its pretty cheap even for a terabyte of storage, B - it removes liability from the application not having to host user content, C - it increases decentralization, with many hosts in many jurisdictions able to host content.
EDIT: I went to sign up for a new account and right away I'm given the choice to host content on my own server, neat, I think I'll give this a try [1]
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20240831230005/https://bsky.app/...
[1] https://docs.bsky.app/blog/self-host-federation
Relays actually don't process media; that's up to the applications. We intentionally keep the repo-hosting costs low (and they'll get lower soon) so that self-hosting your data and keypairs remains affordable. Think of the application model as equivalent to a search engine, with the repo-hosts (PDSes) being web servers. That's almost exactly how it works.
The only way decentralization would make a hug of death irrelevant is if the individual nodes weren't processing the full network, in which case you're not getting the global social experience, so.
Edit: tremendous, thank you!
If I host gifs at bsky.jazzyjackson.xyz, and my posts are indexed by some number of relays, and finally viewed by bsky or an alternate front end app, is that app mirroring my gifs to shoulder the burden, preventing traffic from hitting my $5 VPS?
I always thought {bit,web}torrent would be a good fit for this problem of mirroring content among multiple hosts, but maybe there's a reason no one has gone down that road.
Thanks!
edit: we did have some degradations (user handles entering an invalid state, firehose crashed a couple times, image servers are giving bad load latencies randomly) but we managed to avoid a full outage.
What I really like about it is the ATProto, which while imperfect, seems like the best current design for the next gen of social media built on a federated foundation.
- DID for identity
- PDS for data mobility
- algo feed & moderation choice, you can build your own and anyone on Bluesky can use it (https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-12-2024-stackable-moderati...) If you didn't see, they recently added anti-toxicity features and are looking towards community notes
- Bluesky is the twitter like view, but you can build anything on ATProto and leverage the shared infra
I'm personally working on a "reddit" like view of the Bluesky network. Not a reddit clone, but a different way to organize the same information around topics, news events, and/or links. One could also design their own Lexicon and build something very close to reddit. One of the cool things is that all the objects for all apps are stored into a single SQLite database per user. So if you want to move your data to a different host, all of the apps, content, and connections survive that migration.
Most other "interesting protocol" projects are used exclusively by interesting-protocol enthusiasts.
Will this happen? No clue but it is cool to see someone innovating in this space. Let’s see what people come up with.
Many non-nerds care about having their own TLD and corresponding email address, yet still use Gmail/GSuite, whether via their webapps or IMAP/CalDav/CardDav.
And arguably the most important thing keeping Google accountable for the quality of their products is the threat of users being able to move out on relatively short notice (i.e. without losing all of your historical inbox content and most importantly people being able to reach you via the identifier they know).
Bluesky seems closest to replicating that to the Twitter-like use case. (Mastodon is severely lacking on both portability of identifiers and portability of data across servers; there really needs to be a lightweight middle ground between self-hosting and complete reliance on somebody else's infrastructure).
bsky isn't there yet, but it's growing
I have seen them respond with intrigue and support once these things are explained.
Is the PLC DID (the one all bluesy accounts use) still hardcoded to a single centralised provider?
One example can be that there is a mass attempt at pushing some viewpoint, it may not stick long term but it sticks for the duration of time the content is viewed by the most amount of people. Kind of like how upvote bots mess with Reddit.
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(2) There is plenty of equivalent content
Dead Comment
Now that X got banned in Brazil and to potentially lose over 100M+ users we are starting to see which platforms they are choosing to sign up to.
So far, Bluesky is seeing a surge in user registrations after the invite system was lifted a year ago. I would expect Threads to also see a surge in registrations as well.
Mastodon however appears not to be even considered as a migration path at all yet, but either way it is still early days for all options.
We'll see in the next 6 months after this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39471807
Threads has too big of an image problem to overcome. No one wants Instagram for Twitter.
Bluesky is the only platform currently that has a chance, but it’s an under funded, tiny team who can’t ship on time. Bluesky will see a surge in registrations but no change in DAU as they still haven’t supported video, so no one will stay on the site.
It has about 200M MAU. So a lot of people clearly do want it.
Dead Comment
I'm looking at one of the Mastodon Users Count bots and it seems like there's a 43% increase in sign-ups per weeks since last week. Of course, I have no idea why and that might be normal noise.
Thread doesn’t stand a chance. I don’t have an Instagram account. So I am not going to create one for Threads. Nope. I know friends and colleagues who detest even the idea of this connection even though they have accounts.
Meta/Fb didn’t create X/Tw competition/alternative. They created an Instagram add-on.
Does bsky stand a chance? Probably? Does ATProto stand a chance? Nope, it doesn’t. Sad, but it doesn’t. It has the same Mastadon problems - not technical but practical.
Twitter/X has 368m MAU. Threads has 200m.
Based on trajectories Threads will be the biggest text-first social network in less than a year.
It's amazing how out of touch people on here about what is popular or not.
https://applemagazine.com/is-the-long-extinct-social-network...
https://nostr.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostr
supposedly more distributed and censorship resistant than bsky. https://thenewstack.io/bluesky-vs-nostr-which-should-develop...
I use it daily and I very very rarely see spam messages.
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Now, traffic is going to Bluesky. I wonder if this means that Bluesky has or will be offered the same choice. We might see what the character of that organization is by what choice they make.
Read the NY times article; it is not amazing well done but serves to show how unaccountable the orders of the judge are.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/31/world/americas/brazil-x-b...
Then read the orders from the judge (as claimed by X). "Secretly ban this sitting senator within a few hours"
https://x.com/AlexandreFiles/status/1829979981130416479/phot...
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Is some selective censorship from Musk better than nothing? Since his selective censorship appears to be primarily aimed at supporting right-wing causes, I have a hard time feeling like the answer is "yes".
Maybe the Supreme Court in Brazil is "wrong" and "corrupt" where legislators in India and Turkey are not, but knowing a fair bit about all three countries, I doubt very much that to be the case. So then it's a business decision -- or more like a "whatever pisses Elon off" decision, which in the end is just as "corrupt" as your typical corrupt dictator who acts on whatever pisses them off.
[1] https://x.com/AlexandreFiles/status/1829979981130416479
God this sounds so 1984-ish.
What are the "crimes" they're being accused of? Getting the opposition locked for "crimes" is basically authoritarianism 101. See: Venezuela[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Venezuelan_presidential_e...
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This was discussed at length only two days ago. If you disagree with this, just refer to this comment thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41387024
My account is rate limited to ~5 posts/hour so I don't plan on recreating that thread here.