Free Our Feeds: "it will take independent funding and governance to turn Bluesky’s underlying tech—the AT Protocol—into something more powerful than a single app" (freeourfeeds.com)

submitted 3 weeks ago by cypherpunks@lemmy.ml to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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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.

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[-] M33@lemmy.sdf.org 50 points 3 weeks ago

Or maybe, maybe, join the fediverse instead of yet another corporate media.

[-] Sanctus@lemmy.world 27 points 3 weeks ago

Or they could use ActivityPub

[-] cypherpunks@lemmy.ml 4 points 3 weeks ago

have you read about why they didn't?

[-] MoogleMaestro@lemmy.zip 18 points 3 weeks ago

Whatever reason they don't isn't a very good one when there's already excuses being made around AT proto not being scalable beyond a single app.

ActivityPub works today and we are using it right now. There's basically no incentive to make a new protocol if you aren't willing to support more than 1 platform that uses it.

I'm not even a bluesky hater, but you have to question why they're choosing to reinvent the wheel other than disliking the lack of agency that comes with making a (essentially) proprietary protocol. You have to wonder if they ever truly plan to federated at all or if it's all just lip-service.

[-] cypherpunks@lemmy.ml 5 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

but you have to question why they’re choosing to reinvent the wheel

you don't have to wonder why if you take the time to read about why; see the links in my other comments in this thread if you're curious.

[-] ericjmorey@discuss.online 2 points 3 weeks ago

Federation and decentralization is not what the users of bsky want. It's (for some) a nice to have thing but way down on the list of what they value.

[-] Sanctus@lemmy.world 8 points 3 weeks ago

Does the why matter when the end result is another recreation of an xkcd comic?

[-] cypherpunks@lemmy.ml 7 points 3 weeks ago

In my opinion, yes, the why does in fact matter. This blog post i've linked in other comments in this thread is by one of the authors of the ActivityPub spec. If you care enough to comment about it i recommend reading her analysis of what AT Proto gets right and wrong in comparison with ActivityPub.

[-] Sanctus@lemmy.world 9 points 3 weeks ago

We're still left with multiple competing standards that then need maintainers for the bridges. IMO if we want to truly break from the walled gardens of yore a single federation standard would be more helpful towards that goal. Its cool they want to build Twitter 2. Thats not what most of us on the fediverse are looking forward to tho.

[-] Blaze@feddit.org 4 points 3 weeks ago

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.

[-] AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 3 points 3 weeks ago

Reading through it, I'm not seeing much in favor of ATP. It basically says ATP will never be decentralised. What exactly are the points you're trying to make here?

[-] Mac@mander.xyz 4 points 3 weeks ago

Where do they say?

[-] cypherpunks@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 weeks ago

They mention ActivityPub in a few places, such as this blog post.

But I'd recommend https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/ instead, which is the best discussion I've seen so far of the pros and cons of each of the two approaches.

[-] technomad@slrpnk.net 1 points 3 weeks ago

Why didn't they?

[-] Blaze@feddit.org 13 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Is there any instance other than Bluesky where people can register?

[-] cypherpunks@lemmy.ml 7 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

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:plc using a self-hosted AppView or if maybe you need to use did:web to create a new identity without using their AppView currently.

[-] Blaze@feddit.org 7 points 3 weeks ago

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"?

[-] Emperor@feddit.uk 6 points 3 weeks ago

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.

[-] wisdomchicken@piefed.social 3 points 3 weeks ago

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

https://bsky.app/profile/edavis.dev/post/3lfdtegyzs22i

[-] Blaze@feddit.org 3 points 3 weeks ago

Very interesting, thanks! Is it possible for people to register on that relay?

[-] warmaster@lemmy.world 10 points 3 weeks ago

Bluesky. "We datamine, you pay the bills"

[-] cheese_greater@lemmy.world 3 points 3 weeks ago

Isnt Bluesky like duplicative of what the Feddy is going for?

[-] Eldritch@lemmy.world 5 points 3 weeks ago

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.

[-] Blisterexe@lemmy.zip 2 points 3 weeks ago

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

[-] Kichae@lemmy.ca 4 points 3 weeks ago

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.

[-] Blaze@feddit.org 4 points 3 weeks ago

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?

[-] Blisterexe@lemmy.zip 2 points 3 weeks ago

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.

[-] moonpiedumplings@programming.dev 5 points 3 weeks ago

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

https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

[-] Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 weeks ago

Aren't the top few lemmy servers about that much to run?

[-] Blaze@feddit.org 2 points 3 weeks ago

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.

https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/