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Comment by mullingitover | Hacker News Reader

Bluesky's big selling point is that it's an open protocol, but it's their own homegrown protocol that nobody else is using. Meanwhile Threads has working ActivityPub[1]. You can see threads posts on Mastodon.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/13/24000120/threads-meta-ac...

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Their homegrown protocol is meant to solve real problems with Mastodon, like that your home server owns your user name and can destroy or steal your account where you have all your followers. Account portability on Mastodon requires your current home server to be online and cooperate with you if you want to transfer your account to a different server. With Bluesky, you can do it as long as you have an archive of your data. The intention is to make choosing your home server into a minor implementation detail where the user is always in control instead of a hugely consequential upfront decision as it is with Mastodon.

In all fairness, while yes Bluesky so far has not yet lived up to their promise of decentralisation/federation, it’s still under development. It just hasn’t been built yet.

Though, the whole blue sky stack is significantly more complicated than ActivityPub so I’m doubtful as many would actually set up “instances”.

> it’s still under development. It just hasn’t been built yet.

Someone else was already first to market. Launching as an alternative that is half baked seems like really strange idea to me. Maybe they were trying to gain traction during the surge in Twitter hate, but if the thing you are asking them to jump ship to is a lesser product, only a tiny minority of them are going to stay. Half baked launches into a very well established market just seems like you'd be better off taking your investor's money and having grand ol' time in Vegas.

I agree - they're taking their sweet time. But, they very pointedly and deliberately have not launched yet. They're still very pre-alpha - this is why there's invites (not to try and create some sort of exclusivity).

Naively, I appreciate that they're not trying to rush something out just to compete, but rather are taking the time to build the right thing.

I hate to say it, but when you're a new business on the front page of HN... and people are calling you "pre-alpha"... you're missing the boat. There goes another chance to grab a load of new members.

Is this all about tech?? Not enough funding to get things built?

I am not sure I'm even going to have the patience to wait to be allowed to try this platform. Reviews seem very lukewarm.

On the upside, atproto "instances" (we often call them "personal data servers") have much less responsibility than the typical Mastodon instance. So folks should find them quite cheap and easy to run. One reason is that they don't need to directly support application features such as timeline construction, search, image optimization, etc: they just host your social data.

We have 10 servers federating in production, each housing around 270,000 users, and it all runs on disk and sqlite, quite affordable! We migrated 2 million users off a single large host onto these 10 smaller ones transparently and without need for much fanfare. We're dedicated to the tech and seeing it work in production has been super heartening.

the entire architecture is like if you started with the typical architecture for social network, but then got rid of the organizational perimeters. the atproto instances (PDSes) handle primary data storage, key management, and request routing. they're otherwise quite dumb, which as divy is saying makes them cheap to run and also general purpose for other kinds of applications.

the app-specific business logic lives in the aggregator services that pull from those instances

I'm fine with a new protocol, what I dislike is they marketed it as a main feature and still haven't shipped what was promised. So far Bluesky is just as centralized as Twitter.

ActivityPub has some big flaws. We need something better, but I don't think I trust the Bluesky team to deliver that anymore.

They did recently just federate the core servers. It's no longer a centralized service but blue sky itself is now a proxy for a federation of smaller servers. Users get assigned one at random(?) upon signup and the blue sky api url continues to work and towards to the underlying server.

One step at a time.

Is BlueSky the one running those servers? If so that's still centralized, but yes at least it's a step.

Yeah, that's right. The production network's data layer (Personal Data Servers) are architecturally federated now (i.e. there are multiple PDS hosts) but still operated by a single organization (Bluesky Social, PBC), so it's still centralized.

The goal in early 2024 is to enable federation with other PDS hosts, so that users can choose where they keep their data (posts, likes, preferences, etc).

Can I run my own network today? Is there an open server implementation?

Ed: Apparently you can play in the sandbox, but not set up a seperate network? Or federate with prod?

https://atproto.com/blog/federation-developer-sandbox

https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds

Yup, you could. Although connecting your own PDS hosts to the Bluesky production network won't be possible for a little while longer. Creating custom algorithms (feeds) is already possible, as it participating in the developer sandbox network, including PDS hosting.

The architecture is explained briefly here: https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/5-5-2023-federation-architecture

Code/docs are here:

1. AT Protocol (atproto) is documented here: https://atproto.com

2. App Web/Android/iOS app: https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app

3. API (AppView) and PDS (Personal Data Server): https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto

4. The Relay (formerly BGS) https://github.com/bluesky-social/indigo

5. Custom algorithm (Feed Generator): https://github.com/bluesky-social/feed-generator

6. Sandbox PDS distribution: https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds/blob/main/SANDBOX.md

Thanks. Would it be possible to set up a real self-hosted, federated instance today, so I could set up a community and let others run their own pds'?

You definitely could but it's pretty technically involved and not as easy as it will be in the future. And it would have to be siloed off from the production Bluesky/atproto network at the moment.

I remember so many people who said, “yeah right, Threads will never connect to Mastodon,” and yet here we are. What a time to be alive?

oh boy. if we're marking "what a time to be alive" by having access to a social media platforms version of another social media platform accessible by a 3rd party wannabe social platform, then sheesh, give me the blue pill. i'd rather be part of the matrix.

Bluesky considers lack of activitypub a feature. They don’t want push-content, they want local organic communities.

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