I don't really agree with the characterization of a lot of this post, but one specific technical detail:
> If Bluesky Social, PBC decided to show ads (or do something else you don’t like), it would be very hard for you to switch to a different Relay and still be able to interact with all the other folks who stayed at the Bluesky Social, PBC Relay.
This is backwards, as far as I know. Relays aggregate information from PDSes. If you decide that you want a relay that ignores certain PDSes, and then use an AppView that listens to that relay, you could use it. Your posts would still end up in your PDS. The BlueSky Relay could still be told about your posts, just like your relay would be told about your posts. This doesn't require any other people to do anything.
The issue to be worried about with relays is the other way around: If Bluesky's relay decides to ignore your PDS, then folks that use that relay would have issues seeing your posts. Just like how your relay would be ignoring the ads.
To be fair to them, they have done a significant amount of work to design the network to be open to competing servers, and I think it would be quite tricky to unpick that. In comparison to successful networks like TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, ATP gives a far fairer playing field and Bluesky hasn't done anything (aside from taking funding) to suggest they're not going to run with it.
You are right that they could change their architecture so that their Relay is more trusted or blocks others in some way, once they capture the market. I am not sure what guarantee they could give with the current ATP arch - perhaps a committee would help, but other social networks have no incentive to support ATP.
They have done everything to have the appearance of an open protocol and use that as a competitive advantage against incumbents. However, if you look at the reality, it's a very centralized service run by the same company which controls and develops the protocol.
If they are serious about this, they should hand over ATProto to an organization like W3C.
They said that they don't think ActivityPub is good enough – but why not work with the ActivityPub team to make it better instead of building their proprietary protocol? Why should we trust them?
We looked quite closely at ActivityPub. Here's why we didn't go with it:
1. AP doesn't have the facilities for global aggregation which can power search, discovery, algorithms, and metrics. The user community has been very clear that they do not want it to be introduced. We felt the connectivity of a shared global network was extremely important to the UX, but we felt it would be wrong to fly in the face of the AP world's established norms & wishes.
2. We felt that strong account portability was an extremely important feature of the system, to ensure that users don't get locked into a specific host. AP's redirection model of account migration concerned us.
3. We're concerned about the cost structure of AP. We're concerned that self-hosters are going to pay a prohibitively high price for virality. This is why we designed the network to avoid placing heavy load on PDS.
I know that the AP world is frustrated with the competition between the protocols and suspicious of how we've chosen to do things. It's a shame because I think we're after similar things, and hold similar values. We didn't set out to sabotage the AP world; we just felt like there were important changes that needed to happen for this mission to work.
Note, however: Our software is not proprietary. It's open-source. The specs are open. The network firehose is open. We're working on getting every piece of the infrastructure into good governance and straightforward self-hosting. It just takes time.
>AP doesn't have the facilities for global aggregation which can power search, discovery, algorithms, and metrics.
Very nice way to say "AP isn't centralized enough".
>We felt that strong account portability was an extremely important feature of the system, to ensure that users don't get locked into a specific host. AP's redirection model of account migration concerned us.
>We're concerned about the cost structure of AP. We're concerned that self-hosters are going to pay a prohibitively high price for virality. This is why we designed the network to avoid placing heavy load on PDS.
First of all, self hosting an ActivityPub service is not prohibitively expensive, heck expensive just isn't even a word a would use at all. On the other hand, what's expensive is the cost of hosting the bluesky relay. What you're essentially doing is just taking on the burden/cost of data processing and hiding it from the end user. The fact that ATProto requires a relay is at complete odds with the premise of decentralization and federation. You're no more decentralized than google search giving you results from different websites.
>I know that the AP world is frustrated with the competition between the protocols and suspicious of how we've chosen to do things. It's a shame because I think we're after similar things, and hold similar values. We didn't set out to sabotage the AP world; we just felt like there were important changes that needed to happen for this mission to work.
We're frustrated with bluesky describing itself as decentralized and federated when it isn't. Look, I get it, You guys are trying to run a business. You can't control ActivityPub so you made ATProto. It's your thing so you can make what you want with it. You can make it open-source, but at the end of the day, you guys decide. Just be honest about it.
Believe it or not, it’s possible to have meaningful differences about the way to design a system while maintaining the same motives. It’s clear that you’re happy with the ActivityPub design. I’m not. And your argument right now is akin to saying the Web isn’t decentralized because it uses search engines.
If you actually cared about having a meaningful conversation you wouldn't be tip-toeing around my arguments. There's clear dissonance between the words you're speaking and the actual reality of how ATProto/Bsky works. You say you have the same motives yet this is not what the technology shows.
>your argument right now is akin to saying the Web isn’t decentralized because it uses search engines.
> Very nice way to say "AP isn't centralized enough".
You seem to be operating under the misconception that having large secondary indexing services in the system is the same thing as binding the system to single organizations. Anybody can run a relay or appview, same as anybody can run a PDS.
> What's your current timeline to start accepting incoming account migrations back into the bluesky hosted PDS? When will account migrations officially be a recommended operation? Source: https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds/blob/main/ACCOUNT_MIGR...
When the software is sufficiently tested and implemented.
> First of all, self hosting an ActivityPub service is not prohibitively expensive, heck expensive just isn't even a word a would use at all.
This remains true only so long as the network remains under a certain size, and your posts never go viral.
> On the other hand, what's expensive is the cost of hosting the bluesky relay. What you're essentially doing is just taking on the burden/cost of data processing and hiding it from the end user.
We're keeping the most valuable part of the system -- account ownership -- from having its costs bundled with application ops. It's important that there are hundreds of thousands of account hosts. It's only important that there are 5 to 10 microblogging applications, and that users can switch between them as they come and go.
In fact, I would argue that binding user accounts to individual application instances & their governance like AP does is a massive mistake. It's much more important that you guarantee users' continuity of identity as apps come and go.
I Appreciate you taking the time to properly respond.
>large secondary indexing services
We've talked about this before. The relay isn't secondary. proof of the matter is, bluesky last week went down because it was down.
>Anybody can run a relay or appview, same as anybody can run a PDS.
That's just saying anybody can fork the network if they're not happy. that's not very collaborative and social.
>When the software is sufficiently tested and implemented.
I would think this was a more pressing matter seeing your previous response.
>This remains true only so long as the network remains under a certain size, and your posts never go viral.
I think you're overestimating how taxing going "viral" is on an ActivityPub server. if one of your posts goes viral, it doesn't get hit for every follower you have. It'll only be a request per instance. Plus, task queues exist. Yes going viral is taxing on a server. it doesn't mean the solution is just to offload that burden to some centralized server.
>We're keeping the most valuable part of the system -- account ownership -- from having its costs bundled with application ops.
Except the tradeoff is relying on a handful of large organization that have the resources to burden the cost of running a network. Those networks then decide who gets to post or not. account ownership isn't worth much if you can't speak anywhere. If I were to get banned from the bsky relay, I'd be essentially barred from interacting with anyone on the ATmosphere until someone else came along and created a new relay or appview. On activitypub, maybe mastodon.social doesn't like what I say so they ban my instance. But at least I can still interact with the thousand of other instances that exist. Now you can say, don't be an ass and you won't get banned, and I agree. But when you've created a system where only large organizations have the capacity to run a network, Maybe now I get banned because Coca-Cola decided they didn't want anyone saying Pepsi tasted better on their network.
>In fact, I would argue that binding user accounts to individual application instances & their governance like AP does is a massive mistake.
I think we'll agree to disagree on this one.
As always Appreciate the debates pfraze, hopefully these conversation help users decide which platform they like the best.
Mainly because your here and replying, I looked at self hosting the PDS and bounced off because there wasn't really any documentation on day 2 ops. How do I do backups/disaster recovery? What data is stored here and what happens if it's lost? What kind of traffic should I expect to see? What are the risks around updates?
I can probably figure this stuff out by learning the protocol, but I wish the documentation around hosting was deeper than "run this script to install it, run this other one to update"
However, I also have grown to absolutely love Mastodon and its so many different communities. Whats become clear to me is, I want both, Bluesky and Mastodon.
As I've said many many times before, when it comes to free time, We like different vibes at different times. Sometimes we want a discord night, or maybe an indie movie theater, sometimes we want a drunken dance night, sometimes we want a goth club, sometimes we want a quiet night around a camp fire.
I'm super skeptical when this same set of VC people keep trying to jam all of us into the same place and they keep desperately trying to convince us "This is the only place you want to be! All of you. All at once!" its super weird. and a staggering lack of understanding of humans.
I fell in love with big cities for these exact reasons--there is always something different to do no matter what my mood is. And this is why i fell in love with the wider internet. Always something to do depending on the vibe im hunting. No i dont want to go to the same place with every single other person night after night and no i definitely dont want to hang out with people i dont like at all--thats a weird suggestion.
I want so many options depending on my mood.
At the end of the day both Bluesky and Mastodon are incredible and I dont see one "erasing" the other.
As the article suggests, ideally Bluesky will protect against the inevitable VC vampire suckification and finally actually truly decentralize.
I find the factionalism among nerds over Mastodon and Bluesky to be a fascinating display of clique dynamics at work. Perhaps the most amusing bit is the folks most focused on fighting out these clique dynamics are the ones most likely to think they're the rational types that don't get involved in social dynamics.
At the end of the day, you opt-into either network. My only wish is that the networks interoperate, which is possible right now but as an opt-in thing is patchy and voluntary.
I can tell you that personally, if Bluesky wasn't so miss-reported as being federated and decentralized I wouldn't be caring as much as I did.
I'm happy that bluesky is successful. what I'm not happy about is that it's claiming to be something it isn't and in doing so, undermining all the work people have put into an ecosystem that is TRULY federated and decentralized.
> Compare this to Mastodon, where you can easily switch to a new server and most your follower won’t even notice and business as usual carries on.
I would like to think this is true, but there are just too many frustration stories of confusion of 'which instance' to choose, losing posts due to admins (and followers) shutting down instances and having to tell your followers where to go next.
Best part is the instance they are most likely switching to is the main instance (mastodon.social) since that is the biggest one and less likely to go down, and encourages centralization.
To solve this, they should close sign ups. Why haven't they done that yet?
>To solve this, they should close sign ups. Why haven't they done that yet?
They do periodically closes signups.
>I would like to think this is true, but there are just too many frustration stories of confusion of 'which instance' to choose, losing posts due to admins (and followers) shutting down instances and having to tell your followers where to go next.
Except on bluesky, you don't even get to be confused because it doesn't support any kinds of moves!
It's pretty simple really, Bluesky hasn't magically figured out how to make proper federation work. they just say they're federated but in reality they're really just centralized.
> Except on bluesky, you don't even get to be confused because it doesn't support any kinds of moves!
This is simply not true. There's hundreds of folks who have moved their stuff over. I haven't yet but will be doing so, been too busy with other stuff. But I follow a bunch of people that have moved, and there was zero disruption on my end.
The issues you describe are integral parts of decentralized protocols, and they can't be solved by technology. The reason Bluesky does not have these problems is because they are de facto centralized. No confusion of choosing servers if there's only one server, right?
> having to tell your followers where to go next.
On Mastodon, you can set up an automatic forwarding so your followers automatically follow your new account, they don't even notice you have switched instances if they don't look closely at your handle.
I don't really agree with the characterization of a lot of this post, but one specific technical detail:
> If Bluesky Social, PBC decided to show ads (or do something else you don’t like), it would be very hard for you to switch to a different Relay and still be able to interact with all the other folks who stayed at the Bluesky Social, PBC Relay.
This is backwards, as far as I know. Relays aggregate information from PDSes. If you decide that you want a relay that ignores certain PDSes, and then use an AppView that listens to that relay, you could use it. Your posts would still end up in your PDS. The BlueSky Relay could still be told about your posts, just like your relay would be told about your posts. This doesn't require any other people to do anything.
The issue to be worried about with relays is the other way around: If Bluesky's relay decides to ignore your PDS, then folks that use that relay would have issues seeing your posts. Just like how your relay would be ignoring the ads.
To be fair to them, they have done a significant amount of work to design the network to be open to competing servers, and I think it would be quite tricky to unpick that. In comparison to successful networks like TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, ATP gives a far fairer playing field and Bluesky hasn't done anything (aside from taking funding) to suggest they're not going to run with it.
You are right that they could change their architecture so that their Relay is more trusted or blocks others in some way, once they capture the market. I am not sure what guarantee they could give with the current ATP arch - perhaps a committee would help, but other social networks have no incentive to support ATP.
They have done everything to have the appearance of an open protocol and use that as a competitive advantage against incumbents. However, if you look at the reality, it's a very centralized service run by the same company which controls and develops the protocol.
If they are serious about this, they should hand over ATProto to an organization like W3C.
They said that they don't think ActivityPub is good enough – but why not work with the ActivityPub team to make it better instead of building their proprietary protocol? Why should we trust them?
We looked quite closely at ActivityPub. Here's why we didn't go with it:
1. AP doesn't have the facilities for global aggregation which can power search, discovery, algorithms, and metrics. The user community has been very clear that they do not want it to be introduced. We felt the connectivity of a shared global network was extremely important to the UX, but we felt it would be wrong to fly in the face of the AP world's established norms & wishes.
2. We felt that strong account portability was an extremely important feature of the system, to ensure that users don't get locked into a specific host. AP's redirection model of account migration concerned us.
3. We're concerned about the cost structure of AP. We're concerned that self-hosters are going to pay a prohibitively high price for virality. This is why we designed the network to avoid placing heavy load on PDS.
I know that the AP world is frustrated with the competition between the protocols and suspicious of how we've chosen to do things. It's a shame because I think we're after similar things, and hold similar values. We didn't set out to sabotage the AP world; we just felt like there were important changes that needed to happen for this mission to work.
Note, however: Our software is not proprietary. It's open-source. The specs are open. The network firehose is open. We're working on getting every piece of the infrastructure into good governance and straightforward self-hosting. It just takes time.
>AP doesn't have the facilities for global aggregation which can power search, discovery, algorithms, and metrics.
Very nice way to say "AP isn't centralized enough".
>We felt that strong account portability was an extremely important feature of the system, to ensure that users don't get locked into a specific host. AP's redirection model of account migration concerned us.
What's your current timeline to start accepting incoming account migrations back into the bluesky hosted PDS? When will account migrations officially be a recommended operation? Source: https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds/blob/main/ACCOUNT_MIGR...
>We're concerned about the cost structure of AP. We're concerned that self-hosters are going to pay a prohibitively high price for virality. This is why we designed the network to avoid placing heavy load on PDS.
First of all, self hosting an ActivityPub service is not prohibitively expensive, heck expensive just isn't even a word a would use at all. On the other hand, what's expensive is the cost of hosting the bluesky relay. What you're essentially doing is just taking on the burden/cost of data processing and hiding it from the end user. The fact that ATProto requires a relay is at complete odds with the premise of decentralization and federation. You're no more decentralized than google search giving you results from different websites.
>I know that the AP world is frustrated with the competition between the protocols and suspicious of how we've chosen to do things. It's a shame because I think we're after similar things, and hold similar values. We didn't set out to sabotage the AP world; we just felt like there were important changes that needed to happen for this mission to work.
We're frustrated with bluesky describing itself as decentralized and federated when it isn't. Look, I get it, You guys are trying to run a business. You can't control ActivityPub so you made ATProto. It's your thing so you can make what you want with it. You can make it open-source, but at the end of the day, you guys decide. Just be honest about it.
Believe it or not, it’s possible to have meaningful differences about the way to design a system while maintaining the same motives. It’s clear that you’re happy with the ActivityPub design. I’m not. And your argument right now is akin to saying the Web isn’t decentralized because it uses search engines.
If you actually cared about having a meaningful conversation you wouldn't be tip-toeing around my arguments. There's clear dissonance between the words you're speaking and the actual reality of how ATProto/Bsky works. You say you have the same motives yet this is not what the technology shows.
>your argument right now is akin to saying the Web isn’t decentralized because it uses search engines.
Is that really all I said?
Very well.
> Very nice way to say "AP isn't centralized enough".
You seem to be operating under the misconception that having large secondary indexing services in the system is the same thing as binding the system to single organizations. Anybody can run a relay or appview, same as anybody can run a PDS.
> What's your current timeline to start accepting incoming account migrations back into the bluesky hosted PDS? When will account migrations officially be a recommended operation? Source: https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds/blob/main/ACCOUNT_MIGR...
When the software is sufficiently tested and implemented.
> First of all, self hosting an ActivityPub service is not prohibitively expensive, heck expensive just isn't even a word a would use at all.
This remains true only so long as the network remains under a certain size, and your posts never go viral.
> On the other hand, what's expensive is the cost of hosting the bluesky relay. What you're essentially doing is just taking on the burden/cost of data processing and hiding it from the end user.
We're keeping the most valuable part of the system -- account ownership -- from having its costs bundled with application ops. It's important that there are hundreds of thousands of account hosts. It's only important that there are 5 to 10 microblogging applications, and that users can switch between them as they come and go.
In fact, I would argue that binding user accounts to individual application instances & their governance like AP does is a massive mistake. It's much more important that you guarantee users' continuity of identity as apps come and go.
I Appreciate you taking the time to properly respond.
>large secondary indexing services
We've talked about this before. The relay isn't secondary. proof of the matter is, bluesky last week went down because it was down.
>Anybody can run a relay or appview, same as anybody can run a PDS.
That's just saying anybody can fork the network if they're not happy. that's not very collaborative and social.
>When the software is sufficiently tested and implemented.
I would think this was a more pressing matter seeing your previous response.
>This remains true only so long as the network remains under a certain size, and your posts never go viral.
I think you're overestimating how taxing going "viral" is on an ActivityPub server. if one of your posts goes viral, it doesn't get hit for every follower you have. It'll only be a request per instance. Plus, task queues exist. Yes going viral is taxing on a server. it doesn't mean the solution is just to offload that burden to some centralized server.
>We're keeping the most valuable part of the system -- account ownership -- from having its costs bundled with application ops.
Except the tradeoff is relying on a handful of large organization that have the resources to burden the cost of running a network. Those networks then decide who gets to post or not. account ownership isn't worth much if you can't speak anywhere. If I were to get banned from the bsky relay, I'd be essentially barred from interacting with anyone on the ATmosphere until someone else came along and created a new relay or appview. On activitypub, maybe mastodon.social doesn't like what I say so they ban my instance. But at least I can still interact with the thousand of other instances that exist. Now you can say, don't be an ass and you won't get banned, and I agree. But when you've created a system where only large organizations have the capacity to run a network, Maybe now I get banned because Coca-Cola decided they didn't want anyone saying Pepsi tasted better on their network.
>In fact, I would argue that binding user accounts to individual application instances & their governance like AP does is a massive mistake.
I think we'll agree to disagree on this one.
As always Appreciate the debates pfraze, hopefully these conversation help users decide which platform they like the best.
> AP doesn't have the facilities for global aggregation which can power search, discovery, algorithms, and metrics.
I guess you should also refuse to use the Internet itself, too.
> We felt that strong account portability was an extremely important feature of the system, to ensure that users don't get locked into a specific host
So how do I leave a host and join another, independent one in Bluesky?
For account hosting: https://atproto.com/guides/self-hosting
For running a relay and appview, the code is dispersed among https://github.com/bluesky-social and we're working on a straight-forward distribution
Mainly because your here and replying, I looked at self hosting the PDS and bounced off because there wasn't really any documentation on day 2 ops. How do I do backups/disaster recovery? What data is stored here and what happens if it's lost? What kind of traffic should I expect to see? What are the risks around updates?
I can probably figure this stuff out by learning the protocol, but I wish the documentation around hosting was deeper than "run this script to install it, run this other one to update"
First, let me say, I like Bluesky. A lot.
However, I also have grown to absolutely love Mastodon and its so many different communities. Whats become clear to me is, I want both, Bluesky and Mastodon.
As I've said many many times before, when it comes to free time, We like different vibes at different times. Sometimes we want a discord night, or maybe an indie movie theater, sometimes we want a drunken dance night, sometimes we want a goth club, sometimes we want a quiet night around a camp fire.
I'm super skeptical when this same set of VC people keep trying to jam all of us into the same place and they keep desperately trying to convince us "This is the only place you want to be! All of you. All at once!" its super weird. and a staggering lack of understanding of humans.
I fell in love with big cities for these exact reasons--there is always something different to do no matter what my mood is. And this is why i fell in love with the wider internet. Always something to do depending on the vibe im hunting. No i dont want to go to the same place with every single other person night after night and no i definitely dont want to hang out with people i dont like at all--thats a weird suggestion.
I want so many options depending on my mood.
At the end of the day both Bluesky and Mastodon are incredible and I dont see one "erasing" the other.
As the article suggests, ideally Bluesky will protect against the inevitable VC vampire suckification and finally actually truly decentralize.
The proprietary and for-profit always wins. Even if Mastodon had all of the feature upsides of BlueSky, it would lose the marketing war.
I find the factionalism among nerds over Mastodon and Bluesky to be a fascinating display of clique dynamics at work. Perhaps the most amusing bit is the folks most focused on fighting out these clique dynamics are the ones most likely to think they're the rational types that don't get involved in social dynamics.
At the end of the day, you opt-into either network. My only wish is that the networks interoperate, which is possible right now but as an opt-in thing is patchy and voluntary.
I can tell you that personally, if Bluesky wasn't so miss-reported as being federated and decentralized I wouldn't be caring as much as I did.
I'm happy that bluesky is successful. what I'm not happy about is that it's claiming to be something it isn't and in doing so, undermining all the work people have put into an ecosystem that is TRULY federated and decentralized.
> Compare this to Mastodon, where you can easily switch to a new server and most your follower won’t even notice and business as usual carries on.
I would like to think this is true, but there are just too many frustration stories of confusion of 'which instance' to choose, losing posts due to admins (and followers) shutting down instances and having to tell your followers where to go next.
Best part is the instance they are most likely switching to is the main instance (mastodon.social) since that is the biggest one and less likely to go down, and encourages centralization.
To solve this, they should close sign ups. Why haven't they done that yet?
>To solve this, they should close sign ups. Why haven't they done that yet?
They do periodically closes signups.
>I would like to think this is true, but there are just too many frustration stories of confusion of 'which instance' to choose, losing posts due to admins (and followers) shutting down instances and having to tell your followers where to go next.
Except on bluesky, you don't even get to be confused because it doesn't support any kinds of moves!
It's pretty simple really, Bluesky hasn't magically figured out how to make proper federation work. they just say they're federated but in reality they're really just centralized.
> Except on bluesky, you don't even get to be confused because it doesn't support any kinds of moves!
This is simply not true. There's hundreds of folks who have moved their stuff over. I haven't yet but will be doing so, been too busy with other stuff. But I follow a bunch of people that have moved, and there was zero disruption on my end.
The issues you describe are integral parts of decentralized protocols, and they can't be solved by technology. The reason Bluesky does not have these problems is because they are de facto centralized. No confusion of choosing servers if there's only one server, right?
> having to tell your followers where to go next.
On Mastodon, you can set up an automatic forwarding so your followers automatically follow your new account, they don't even notice you have switched instances if they don't look closely at your handle.
Another good take on Bluesky: https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/#tie-yoursel....
tl;dr: Lack of decentralization inevitably leads to the enshittification, intentional or not.
In Borat voice... "Very nice".