No joke, this PR adds preliminary ActivityPub (i.e. Mastodon) support to the PDS. 🤯
IMPORTANT: You shouldn't expect full interoperability with this alone! At most, you should expect that your p...
Hmm, let’s see if I remember the terminology correctly:
Client apps have nothing to do with it, obviously.
Alternate appviews have nothing to do with it, except in that they’d presumably need to work with whatever form of atproto federation exists, if any did.
Alternate relays aren’t federated unless there’s some protocol for routing messages between them — such as ActivityPub.
A PDS stores your posts/comments/likes/blocks/articles/whatever. These all get crawled and saved to a relay.
An appview connects to a relay and sorts through all the posts, and indexes them.
They handle all the interactions, rather than passing messages between servers.
If bsky goes out of business and shuts down their servers, will these continue to function?
Yes, but there will be far less people since everyone’s on bsky.social. Kinda like mastodon.social.
Does bsky still have any control at all over moderation?
Great question! Bluesky has individual moderation services you can subscribe to, and these hide/label posts for you.
bsky has no control over moderation if you are not on their servers, and you are not subscribed to their moderation service.
because hosting a full-network relay is super cheap, including bandwidth. there are multiple people who are running full-network relays (monitoring and relaying everything from every PDS) for less than 30USD per month
Well that’s an interesting development, which people seem to have begun experimenting with in the past few weeks. Of course for the time being I suppose it’s made somewhat easier for the relays by 99% of the users being hosted on the small collection of official bsky.network PDS servers.
Some more discussion of it in which there may be hints as to how atproto people might slowly progress towards reinventing some of the things we take for granted on the fediverse.
i think the main takeaway is that the fediverse has hugely overindexed on relays being this big huge centralising force in the atproto network. And thats simply not true at all. The flipside of that is that relays also dont really matter much either. All they do is simply aggregating from a distributed network of data storage into a single firehose. Its really cool that you can do that for super cheap. but its also just a small part of the entire network architecture. like, atproto relays are not CDNs, for example, and video CDNs are expensive to run.
If they don’t crawl the entire network then most of the network cannot contact them at all? Which makes it … not really a network. That’s where federation would come in.
It does federate though, federation is multiple nodes in a network cooperating, which they do.
HTTP is a network even though it doesn’t (usually) federate.
Thats completely untrue :) .
app.wafrn.net is a separate app that connects to bluesky, atproto.africa is an alternate relay, deer.social is an alt appview.
You can use bluesky without relying on bluesky now.
Hmm, let’s see if I remember the terminology correctly:
Client apps have nothing to do with it, obviously.
Alternate appviews have nothing to do with it, except in that they’d presumably need to work with whatever form of atproto federation exists, if any did.
Alternate relays aren’t federated unless there’s some protocol for routing messages between them — such as ActivityPub.
So, bluesky works differently to fedi.
A PDS stores your posts/comments/likes/blocks/articles/whatever. These all get crawled and saved to a relay.
An appview connects to a relay and sorts through all the posts, and indexes them.
They handle all the interactions, rather than passing messages between servers.
Let me just ask the less technical and more important questions:
Yes, but there will be far less people since everyone’s on bsky.social. Kinda like mastodon.social.
Great question! Bluesky has individual moderation services you can subscribe to, and these hide/label posts for you.
bsky has no control over moderation if you are not on their servers, and you are not subscribed to their moderation service.
Right… it did take me a minute to remember how the relays work. Well, when there are a few hundred of them we’ll see how it goes.
There’s a good few small ones.
It can work without relays anyway, an appview can crawl PDSes directly.
Really? I thought there were only two. How are the small ones able to afford the bandwidth to monitor everything from every PDS?
because hosting a full-network relay is super cheap, including bandwidth. there are multiple people who are running full-network relays (monitoring and relaying everything from every PDS) for less than 30USD per month
https://fediversereport.com/atmosphere-report-116/
Well that’s an interesting development, which people seem to have begun experimenting with in the past few weeks. Of course for the time being I suppose it’s made somewhat easier for the relays by 99% of the users being hosted on the small collection of official bsky.network PDS servers.
Some more discussion of it in which there may be hints as to how atproto people might slowly progress towards reinventing some of the things we take for granted on the fediverse.
This news probably deserve its own post
i think the main takeaway is that the fediverse has hugely overindexed on relays being this big huge centralising force in the atproto network. And thats simply not true at all. The flipside of that is that relays also dont really matter much either. All they do is simply aggregating from a distributed network of data storage into a single firehose. Its really cool that you can do that for super cheap. but its also just a small part of the entire network architecture. like, atproto relays are not CDNs, for example, and video CDNs are expensive to run.
That’s why I said small ones, they don’t crawl the entire network.
There is the freeourfeeds one coming soon.
If they don’t crawl the entire network then most of the network cannot contact them at all? Which makes it … not really a network. That’s where federation would come in.
It does federate though, federation is multiple nodes in a network cooperating, which they do.
HTTP is a network even though it doesn’t (usually) federate.