mcc
Been getting this sense lately that the fediverse may be thinning out a bit, and in parallel getting a sense people I know are finally jumping to "bluesky" in numbers.
Trying to figure out exactly at what point I decide I'm willing to create a feed over there. My position has been "I'll post there when I don't have to use their servers to do it", but I continue to suspect this will literally never happen because their protocol is designed to look like federation without being ever federatable
blaine
@mcc a lot of people I know are asking these questions!
Once upon a time (mid-2008? Oh, I was so naive) I tried to build an "apache/cgi-bin for building cross-protocol decentralized social tools." At the time that was xmpp, pubsubhubbub, RSS, and indieweb-i-guess. I maintain that it's still possible with the modern set of photos, and probably easier than one would reckon (and probably harder, too). I'm not sure what the modern metaphor would be (so many options!)
blaine
@mcc the other historical story here that I can offer is that the xmpp pubsub spec (xep-60) was around 350 printed pages. I sat down with Peter Saint Andre and @hildjj at OSCON in 2007 and we wrote out a minimal profile of the spec in Notepad.exe that was *two* printed pages *including* example XML stanzas. That "tiny spec[k]" formed the basis of the functional pubsub Interop that @ralphm and I implemented between Twitter and Jaiku, basically over one evening at Social Web FooCamp.
mcc
Whelp looks like Bluesky finally crossed the line of "okay, when they do this, I'll set up a Bluesky account" https://bsky.social/about/blog/02-22-2024-open-social-web
So… maybe I'll do it now. IDK
I'm still pretty confused what a "PDS" is. Like exactly what the scope of its responsibilities are. Bluesky's page for the PDS server https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds explains poorly either what the software does or even what dependencies it has.
I guess I gotta go read a 18-month-old architecture document & hope it still describes reality.
mcc
A question I keep asking myself with both Mastodon/ActivityPub and BlueSky is "What is the minimum viable server you need to participate in this?"
Do you *have* to have a database server? Does it have to be a big beast like mysql/postgres or for a one-user "instance" can it just be a sqlite file?
Do you *have* to have server "software" running, or can you get by by serving static files off a (say) https server?
Do the answers to the above change if you don't care about receiving "replies"?
mcc
Based on my (admittedly based on reading summaries of the whitepapers and not the whitepapers) understanding of the proposed bsky protocol, I think if I want to post in a way bsky users can see without using the services of BlueSky LLC the best I'll ever be able to do is post a write-only feed on my website which BlueSky LLC then crawls. But I wonder if I'll be able to opt into this kind of parasitic federation without agreeing to a TOS that gives BlueSky LLC rights to train an LLM on me
mcc
Imagine an alternate network shape for ATProto where instead of BlueSky's "Big Aggregator" relay, users associate their identifies with specific "home" relays, and relays only fetch posts from relays their "home" users follow "home" users on. This could enable non-algorithmic moderation by treating relay membership as "trust" and severing relays who don't internally moderate. Hey wait, we just reinvented ActivityPub without domain names!
You know what I want? ActivityPub without domain names :(
mcc
I regret that this mini-thread did not give me an opportunity to engage in my running joke of intentionally misinterpreting the abbreviation "bsky" to mean "Bullshit, Kentucky"
mcc
Basically (I ran out of characters and had to post this as an image) this post is mean but it is sincerely how I feel
Ted Mielczarek
@mcc We're proud to announce the creation of the Torment Nexus Foundation, a non-profit organization that will ensure that the Torment Nexus remains available for humanity for the forseeable future.
mcc
The problem is this seems like Work, and I could be doing something else with my spare time that is fun and interesting instead of doing labor to grow out the network of a "public benefit corporation" (?) that appears to be trying to put an enclosure around a previously public resource
mcc
If I wind up making a Bluesky PDS what this will most likely look like is some relatively (God, I hope) small block of code that connects to mastodon.social once an hour, reads my Mastodon feed like a regular client, and then republishes it into whatever format PDSes publish timelines in. And then I guess my profile just says "I cannot read your replies, join some actually federated network if you want to talk to me"
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