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

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…

@HistoPol @UlrikeHahn @si_irini For A), if someone who is bridged to Bluesky boosts your posts here, the post doesn't go to Bluesky, unless you are also bridged.

For B and C, of course that's possible, just like with linking to and screenshotting any other website on the web.

@BeAware @iamwaseem Looks like they both have something on the order of 1M active users monthly though, and a similar number of daily posts too (~700-800k)

@BeAware one is posts per source (the more "toothy" one because of weekends), one is users per source, third is just P users from the second one (= non-Bluesky and non-Bridgy PDSes)

@BeAware Updated charts from today: https://bsky.app/profile/mackuba.eu/post/3kwrp7j3ytv2q

@BeAware last update from 2 weeks ago here: https://snarfed.org/2024-06-24_53250, the key part is: "opt in prompts via DM, both directions, soon"

There's been a lot of progress in the last 2 months, basically all these things that weren't working are mostly working now.