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  • So... "federation" without control? What's the point?

    They stress that a difference between their federation and ActivityPub is that on ActivityPub "your “instance”, or server, determines your community, so your experience depends on which server you join" while for them "On Bluesky, your experience is based on what feeds and accounts you follow, and you can always participate in the global conversation (e.g. breaking news, viral posts, and algorithmic feeds)." and "Moderation on Bluesky is not tied to your server, like it is on Mastodon. Defederation, a way of addressing moderation issues in Mastodon by disconnecting servers, is not as relevant on Bluesky because there are other layers to the system."

    The big difference is that I can't choose an instance that blocks/does not interact with the servers loaded with Nazis, terrorists, and/or child abusers? Why the hell is it of such paramount importance to Jack Dorsey that the rest of us are forced to interact with Nazis?

    • Yea I really don't understand why they list this is a benefit. But they don't really explain it fully in the post it seems.

    • Tbf from the short time I've been on bluesky it seems like their algorithms are very good, I have followed the people I'm interested in and seen 0 nazi posts so far

      • This highlights an interesting point:

        IF a platform hosts terrorism { white-supremacism, islamist supremacism, male-supremacism with its beloved domestic-violence "enforcement", communist-party machiavellianism, fascist machiavellianism, moneyarchist machiavellianism, etc. }...

        and is able to hide that from the "majority"..

        THEN they're doing good for the world, aren't they?

        Hiding one's evils isn't what "doing good" means.

        Not enforcing evil, is what doing good means.

        Humankind'll walk, willingly, into its own slaughterhouse, for sake of the lollipops humankind's fed by the manipulators of the world.

        That has been going-on for centuries.

        Nothing's magically changing, surprise, surprise.

        _ /\ _

    • I mean, if the server is running in a host you control, you can do whatever with it, no? You can just modify the software to just not do what other servers say, no?

    • ? You can block the entire nazi server and you will essentially be defederates from it without relying on your servers admins to do it. This makes it easier to block nazis?

      • So every new user needs to block all the nazi servers themselves before they get a non-nazi feed?

        The whole point of joining a server that defederates nasty stuff for you is that you delegate that responsibility to someone you trust to handle moderation for you. Just like you trust community mods or the admins of your instance on Lemmy.

      • without relying on your servers admins to do it

        But I want to rely on my server admins for that. To me that's a feature, not a bug.

      • Can you block entire servers, though? Do you have the ability to even tell content apart based on server of origin? It's not clear that you can and the implication seems to be that the only thing you get out of hosting your own server is hosting your own data; it doesn't seem to offer you any sort of control over federation.

      • users can do that already on fediverse..? Additionally admins have power to block servers they wish, that gives much control and is a lot better, dont see the advantage bluesky is pretending to have.

    • Users have to maintain public blocklists to deal with poor moderation from BSky HQ. For the most part, it works, but if you get on the bad side of anyone running a list you're basically at the mercy of them not using their lists for personal vendettas. When that does happen, all it does is dilute the usefulness of said blocklists and in turn lets the bad actors back into the mix as people unsubscribe.

      I guess it's an immature system and maybe people will create services to maintain lists with proper accountability, appeals, etc. but that's just trying to skirt around the main issue which is that Bluesky LLC is not interested in federating the backend service.

      As for their "you can't interact with viral posts" claim, that's only a Mastodon problem - IMO they designed their feed system really shitty for a service trying to imitate Twitter. On Lemmy, I can easily see active posts across dozens of instances without having to subscribe to them, and the communities of those instances have a right to decide who does and doesn't federate. We've successfully sectioned off troublesome communities, without turning the entire network into a fragmented map of isolation.

      I would like activitypub to better support instances that do nothing but host personal data without having to also technically be a full platform (ie. those tiny masto/lemmy instances for people who dont wanna make accounts on someone else's server). But for the regular user the current AP system is way better than what BSKY offers.

      That being said, I like Bluesky and its community, I just dont think it deserves to be "fediverse".

    • You're talking about "Nazis" so much it looks like you travelled straight from 1942 to now just a few moments ago and do not yet grasp the fact that Bluesky would obviously ban them since it's like a big monolithic Mastodon instance

  • It's such a thing a privately federated system? Seems like an ideological contradiction..

    • This is the same criticism that was made of cryptocurrency's claim to fame regarding decentralization, consensus, and resilience to authoritarian takeover.

      "If you take all these different parts of your identity, all the games you play, all the things you buy, all the groups you join, and stick them into one system, that's a central system. It doesn't matter how many servers that system spans, you've pooled all that data in one place."

      And ultimately we can make the same criticism of the Fediverse itself. It's nice that there are different platforms, different instances, different communities... but it's still just one entity at the end of the day. This is especially apparent with the spam wave we just saw. Misskey, Mastodon, Lemmy, even kbin was not invulnerable. You don't need to attack them individually, you can attack them all at once, and then they will naturally spread your attack to other instances for you.

    • Bluesky is uniquely un-private. For instance, you can see who blocks who.

      • Supposing Bluesky Inc. would want to cut the cord to a particular instance it would be possible? Beside just defederating but getting it completely down?

  • Why not just use AP? who else will use their protocol? also it doesnt even seem "federation" for real as other users pointed out here

    • Why not just use AP?

      https://urbanists.video/w/n7xyeV1kbW8mUKr4ncchhs

      That blusky didn't use [activitypub] is so typical of these companies. It's like the lightning cable when everyone else is using USB-C. Fuck you apple, and your shitty plug. And fuck you blusky and your reinvention of the wheel. Use the standard you egotistical F$*!4.

  • Outside of bluesky who's even using their protocol? Such a weird way of doing things when AP is already a thing...

  • Im confused why people are confused that they announced federation without having servers to federate with? It literally just got announced why would people expect there to already be big servers for them to federate with?

    • Because why would you federate using your own protocol when there's a perfectly viable protocol (ActivityPub) that you could use instead and you could federate with the whole Fediverse from day 1.

      • Because they want to make a better protocol? Yeah it sucks theyre not compatible but i dont really blame them when activitypub hasn’t received updates in a very very long time. I mistrust bluesky since theyre VC funded but i also appreciate the new features theyre doing and hope it causes activitypub to improve.

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