Definitionally, an AppView is not just a different frontend, it’s perhaps better described as an indexer, it’s a sense-making tool for the raw data of the firehose with its own API. And Blacksky.community as of now is still using the bsky.app API.
You can verify this yourself with developer tools:
Thus, Blacksky.community is a different frontend, but not a different AppView. The only full parity alternative AppView to my knowledge is still Zeppelin.social.
You can (and should) log in with app passwords instead of your actual password for sure. You can revoke them in your settings if anything goes wrong. As for Zeppelin, I can only say that its creator Futur has good standing in the community, but I understand if people are still wary.
Hey that’s my screenshot! :)
Rudy Fraser and the Blacksky team also have a custom frontend (https://blacksky.community/) with some cool stuff like a sign-up feature with a custom domain picker, but it’s still using the Bsky API under the hood. Which is fine, can’t be overstated how hard it must be to reimplement the entire API.
Evan Prodromou commented to say he “disagrees with the purpose of this statement”.
I don’t understand what he gets out of being so antagonizing. Lovely statement though, nice to see so many signatures.
you need thousands of dollars
Search up “Mastodon instances” and then “Bluesky instances”
Bluesky has a different architecture, there are no “instances”, it’s PDSs, relays and AppViews, all of which can be and are already being self-hosted.
they’re just jumping on the train with the billionaire who runs it
If you mean Dorsey, he has had nothing to do with Bluesky for well over a year now because he resented them implementing moderation tools
well I mean technically not, Kuba is self-hosting his account at https://lab.martianbase.net/
I might be wrong, but feeds get their data from relays, correct? So if you are using any of the Blacksky feeds, presumably you would indirectly be using the atproto.africa relay?
You mention the costs of running a relay as mentioned in the Christine Lemmer-Webber piece, but since that piece was written, Bluesky made a significant update to how relays work, making them much cheaper to operate. Bryan Newbold made a blog post about how he managed to run a relay for $34 a month. Dozens of people run such full-network relays now! Christine Lemmer-Webber herself even first assumed those were not pulling the full network, but later corrected herself!
It remains to be seen how well all of that will scale if the network continues to grow, but can we please please move away from completely exaggerated claims like “it costs millions to run an independent node”?
I’m more thinking about users on small instances that are being abandoned or perhaps fall victim to some defederation drama (or similar) over time.
It works as a bandaid solution, but a more seamless account migration would go a long way to make the fediverse as a whole better imo.
First of all it’s incongruent to talk about “instances” in a Bluesky context, there are no instances, there are PDSes, relays and AppViews.
Second of all, people have only been starting to self-host these branches of the architecture in the last few months. You could make the same argument about mastodon.social, especially when the service was still in its infancy. Even now that it is more mature, mastodon.social still has an outsized influence over the entire fediverse with Rochko acting as “benevolent dictator for life”.
There are initiatives to shepherd users away from Bluesky PBC servers like Blacksky, Northsky, Free Our Feeds etc. and Bluesky PBC has not given me any indication that they are trying to hamper these initiatives—they are making small incremental changes towards a more democratized ecosystem all the time, for example just last week they implemented a new atproto account management, that was rolled out for all self-hosters and is by default free of Bluesky branding.
edit: to make my point more clear, yes, obviously Bluesky could be more democratized, but given how young the service is, it’s being held to an impossible and ever-shifting standard and also I can’t stand how people here baselessly insinuate that any non-flat hierarchies are somehow a nefarious plot by Bluesky PBC to “federation-wash” their product.
https://bsky.app/profile/bad-example.com/post/3loe7iy2gdc2c
Now that dozens of people are hosting their own relays and we have third-party AppViews, the first posts are being made to Bluesky without using any of Bluesky PBC’s architecture, but sure it’s not decentralized and will never happen or whatever.
I find all of your comments here deeply shameful, especially since you are representing slrpnk.net, from your own manifesto:
The “punk” in Solarpunk is about rebellion, counterculture, post-capitalism, decolonialism and enthusiasm.
Yet you are using your voice here to defend state-mandated infringement of free speech, of decolonialist speech at the behest of the zionist project. I honestly think you should consider if you can still credibly administer slrpnk or alternatively if it makes sense for you to moderate a comm that is seemingly so misaligned with your professed values.
The main difference between Threadsky and Frontpage is that Threadsky is just yet another Bluesky re-skin, it’s just regular Bluesky posts presented in a reddit-like format, whereas Frontpage has its own dedicated lexicon and doesn’t ingest the Bluesky firehose at all. I think Frontpage is really neat, but it has been shown little love unfortunately, it hasn’t meaningfully changed in months.
Why do we need to treat these people as if they are majesty? It’s a stupid remnant of feudalism. For the privilege of being the highest ranking official they should have to endure being called a “tyrant” here and there, even if the accusations are spurious.
While I generally avoid politics on this blog, it’s hard to ignore the political biases permeating X and BlueSky. X has veered heavily toward far-right ideologies, while BlueSky is often associated with far-left communities. This polarized landscape doesn’t work for those of us seeking a neutral space for meaningful interactions.
lol
Unpopular opinion here, but: as opposed to other twitter clones like Hive Social and such, that also look sleek and are simple, but didn’t go anywhere, Bluesky did manage to attract a sizeable crowd of creative and talented open source indie devs that are passionate about it and build cool stuff on atproto. Whether it’s custom feeds or star sign labelers or alternative clients that add more features or entirely new appviews like the oekaki board PinkSea, you get the feeling it is a pretty vibrant ecosystem and this has sustained it all these months.
While this is true for the Fediverse as well, I think it’s fair to say that there have been rumblings here about lack of direction and proper stewardship of the Fediverse and if you want this place to succeed you can’t just sweep it under the rug, shrug your shoulders and say “well, people who pick Bluesky over Mastodon are just stupid”.
Why not self-host your Bluesky personal data server?
Been there for over a year now and fwiw, this wave feels more sustainable than before. In previous waves, a lot of people went back to Twitter after a week because Twitter still had “the juice” and Bluesky didn’t, but with 15 now million members and decent engagement, this is starting to turn around.
Not a silver bullet by any means, but it is refreshing to see some issues being addressed after the whole moderation debacle last week. Paul Frazee also wrote a blog post saying they want to move away from PDS-level account takedowns except where legally required or to combat spam/network abuse.