Yes, this is the strongest argument against it and the biggest flaw. They keep saying in interviews that they are treating their future selves as adversaries and they do open source most everything but I would be a lot happier if the protocol development was spun off into a separate org from the for profit service. If it dies, this will be what killed it. But I hope they make it (by it I mean the tools for everyone else to make the ecosystem).
Yes, and I’ve been yelling at them about the problem of scaling down for a while, since the same “relay” service needs to be both a firehose and a full mirror. This requirement (and thus scalability) of running a relay is becoming a big problem even for the main devs. According to them however you can mitigate this to a reasonable amount for a home lab (~8 cores, 16gb ram, ~2Tb ssdl) if you simply don’t store any backlog and just retransmit posts https://bsky.app/profile/why.bsky.team/post/3lbjdux6ubc2f
This is what they’re doing internally to manage the load and are also working on implementing relay sharding/scoping to let you just index a small slice of the network, which should eliminate the problem. https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/discussions/3036 and here’s someone implementing a proof of concept third party version https://bsky.app/profile/pet.bun.how/post/3lbwnx2rxxs2o
It’s true that the main devs’ priorities are building the large scale parts first and then worrying about downscaling, the whole point was always to replace twitter and work at a similar scale, which requires hard tradeoffs. I do worry that they’ll run out of money before they can do the work to let the ecosystem become sustainable by itself.
But I have faith (for now) because they have people I know from when they worked on secure-ssb and dat protcols, which are truly decentralized but never took off for other reasons.
Thats the opposite of what I said. You can use the same data with multiple services at the same time, in fact this is already possible. The whole thing would be kinda pointless otherwise.
The entire point is that your pds can interact with multiple “instances” of bluesky or whatever other apps people build on the protocol.
For example there is a reddit/hn clone that people can post on (keeping their same identity) when the official bluesky service goes down. The reddit clone is fully independent from the twitter clone, but they use the same protocol and (unlike AP) the same hosting and authentication infrastructure.
Whereas on Lemmy and mastodon, my accounts are totally separate. And unlike AP, your data lives on your own pds and is never hostage to the owner of the instance that actually runs the load bearing interactivity. If they become compromised or shut down you can switch to another. No cooperation from the old owner required (unlike activitypub).
Bluesky is not making a reddit alternative, a third party developer is using their hosting/auth infrastructure.
https://bsky.app/profile/frontpage.fyi
https://github.com/likeandscribe/frontpage
I asked the devs about this and they said that bluesky is designed to be a) modular b) trustless as much as possible. federation is supposed to happen on the trustless hosting and relay layers - you can ask your posts to be crawled by any indexer/appview.
But once you get to the indexing/querying layer, there are no more merkle proofs to keep everyone honest, so there is no point in federating because any indexer can modify/censor the content they send to another indexer instance. So you could still build an api to interact laterally between servers, but it wouldn’t be atproto anymore.
Bluesky (well, atproto, bluesky is the twitter clone running on atproto as a demo app) doesn’t actually have instances in the mastodon sense, it’s a more modular design for better scaling (because it was designed from the start to replace twitter)
Here’s a good article with illustrations https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers
That the universal ports are worse for some purposes than the old specialized ones. I feel this especially for magsafe and analog audio
no, no, he has a point
That post refers to hosting an appview that does all the same things as the official bsky (the service) one, which involves a ton of storage and bandwidth and processing (for everyone’s recommendations, notifications, and all the other moving parts), and is closed source to boot.
Frontpage.fyi is a lot cheaper simply because its used by like 50 people tops.
Because we live in a capitalist hellscape and the companies that implemented these tricks were the fastest growing segment of our economy for like 15 years (esp after the 2008 crash) so the government turned a blind eye. Now they control the world and are able to literally buy politicians
There are already smaller appviews that use the existing hosting/authentication infra, but bypassing the bsky appview aggregation. Nothing with any real scale but for example there is a barebones reddit/hackernews equivalent https://frontpage.fyi/
Things like using surveillance to figure out when your payday is and raising prices (just for you, and just on that day) because you psychologically are more willing to spend in that moment
Unfortunately a lot of our peers are also tech illiterate :(
The freshrss GitHub has a list of supported iphone apps and indicates some of them work offline. https://github.com/FreshRSS/FreshRSS?tab=readme-ov-file#apis--native-apps