Notices by Kuba Suder • @mackuba.eu on 🦋 (mackuba@martianbase.net), page 2

@BeAware I think you could even not have a "Bluesky profile" record with bio and avatar etc. to use WhiteWind this way (I'm not 100% sure though how the account tooling works on the installable PDS).

@BeAware Yeah yeah, that's basically the same thing - I've seen some discussions a few times "How should we call this on the website? Log in with what?", but generally I think most people agreed that "Bluesky" will be more meaningful to more new users than "AT Protocol"…

@BeAware In practice it should work this way: you enter either the address of your PDS, or your handle which is resolved to your DID which is then used to find the address of your PDS, then the app contacts your PDS to authenticate to your account and get back access token from the PDS. If your on your own PDS then none of your account data is hosted on Bluesky servers except the (public) DID JSON file on plc.directory.

@BeAware Ok so I'm not sure I understand what you want exactly 😅 So you could have a PDS that you've installed on your server, sign up for an account on that PDS, and then log in to WhiteWind and Frontpage with that account. At that point the only places where you'd have something to do with Bluesky infrastructure is:
- the Bluesky Relay which WhiteWind and Frontpage almost certainly pull data from because I'm sure they don't run their own
- the plc.directory which registers DIDs

@BeAware But *that's the whole point*! "One account for multiple apps", that's the selling point. Kind of like in AP you can follow PixelFed from Mastodon, in AT you're supposed to be able to log in with the same account to Bluesky or to WhiteWind and reuse some data between them (or not, you can just make a separate account). It's not really a Bluesky account, it's an ATProto account technically. You should be able to log in with non-Bsky PDS to WhiteWind and Frontpage, if not - that's a bug.

I heard some meowing outside my apartment, so I looked outside and I found this lovely creature 🥹 #cat

Current #Bluesky status 🇧🇷😬

@BeAware @tom Yup! You can log in if you want to give likes, but other than that everything works without login.

@BeAware @tom You can use my thread reader tool to view posts which are not accessible on bsky.app: https://blue.mackuba.eu/skythread/ - not as convenient, but gets the job done at least.

@frumble @BeAware @mho It wasn't really something that Bluesky wanted to add, it's just that it was locked behind a login wall at first and some people got used to this, and when they said they would allow viewing posts without a login, some people protested - and eventually to satisfy them, they added this setting where you can hide your profile & posts from public viewing on bsky.app. But they're still all visible in the API and through other tools.

@BeAware Technically [public] AP posts also end up having their copies on a ton of different servers though, right?

@BeAware E.g. the reason why I can generate a chart like this on my own website is because I have all those bridged posts in my SQLite, so I can do something like "select count(*) from posts group by origin, date".

@BeAware Oh yeah, I know very well. One of the reasons why I build stuff for AT and not for AP ;)

That is a bit of a fundamental difference, so if someone *really* cares about this, they're probably better off sticking to AP (and not enabling Bridgy), because that's not likely to change in a major way because the whole architecture is built on this.

@BeAware I think the misunderstanding is because you're looking at it from the ActivityPub perspective and expect it to work in a similar way, but it doesn't, but that doesn't mean that it's worse.

You're asking about connecting to Bluesky servers, but there's really two different things here that I think are worth separating:

1) when I have my PDS, do I need to contact any Bluesky servers in order to communicate with someone else who has a PDS?

2) do our posts end up on Bluesky servers?

@BeAware By looking up the account on bsky.app you prove 2), but not 1).

What do you need to communicate with someone: you make records like follow, like, comment to your PDS. You don't need Bluesky servers for that.

But you also need to read their replies in notifications/threads/timeline and the posts they make in a feed. For that you need an AppView you can pull this data from. Right now only Bluesky runs an AppView.

@BeAware But like I mentioned in the other thread, I could build some bare-bones minimal AppView that does these things with not that much more work on top of what I have now, and then I could at least follow and reply to someone and read their responses. Mostly I'm missing follows data at the moment, if we ignore likes, I have the posts.

@BeAware An unrelated question is whether our posts end up on Bluesky servers. By default yes unless you try hard to stop that, I'm not sure how much that is possible. Relays generally can crawl the network and discover PDSes to pull from, so you'd need to have an IP whitelist and block connections from other IPs, but theoretically possible. Otherwise your profile and posts will be visible on bsky.app - even if you have your own PDS and use your own AppView, but that's ok. Just another copy.

@BeAware @Shoesmithlc Nah, they rather implied the opposite, that they don't intend to do that: https://www.wired.com/story/bluesky-ceo-jay-graber-wont-enshittify-ads/

Also you didn't say there will be advertisers at some point, you said "they sell your data to advertisers" 🙃

@BeAware @Shoesmithlc Wait, what advertisers 🤔

@HistoPol @UlrikeHahn @si_irini If you *don't* block the bridge, you also aren't sharing anything with Jack Dorsey - mostly because Jack Dorsey doesn't have anything to do with Bluesky anymore…