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.

Seriously, I’m so tired of this “we on Mastodon are the Eloi and they on Bluesky are the Morlocks” type bs, that kind of hostility to regular users makes me not want to be on the Fediverse at all.

Ah sorry, bad timing, the handle stopped working a few hours ago, maybe the person has changed it, here is the same link with the handle-agnostic DID in the url: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:by3jhwdqgbtrcc7q4tkkv3cf/post/3l47yhps2xv2c

Ah sorry, bad timing, the handle stopped working a few hours ago, maybe the person has changed it, here is the same link with the handle-agnostic DID in the url: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:by3jhwdqgbtrcc7q4tkkv3cf/post/3l47yhps2xv2c

I haven’t even found anything suggesting one could realistically selfhost it

Check this out, this person self-hosted one for fun

If we’re talking about self-hosting your own personal data storage (PDS), a few hundred people are doing that, here is a list. Apparently a Raspberry Pi is sufficient to host a PDS.

Sorry for the late reply, but I wanted to address your question – I think one misunderstanding is: in a sense there are no Bluesky accounts and there are no Frontpage accounts, there are only atproto accounts. Whether you make a post on Bluesky or Frontpage or Whitewind or Smokesignal, all of them get collected in the same repository. Here is a neat atproto browser which can display this, this is the account of Frontpage founder Tom Sherman and you can find all of his collections there: https://atproto-browser.vercel.app/at/tom-sherman.com

Bluesky still isn’t there yet on that side (and probably won’t, as it would prevent them from generating revenue if someone can just open a server and connect to their network)

I don’t think that’s necessarily true. As fas as I know there are no plans to inject ads, they are planning to create a marketplace for custom feeds (think “premium” feeds) and labelers and such where they would take a cut. You would obviously still be able to purchase access to them from other servers. But this goal seems kinda lofty, not sure if it can be viable.