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?
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
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.
? 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.
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.
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?
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".
They were clear from the start they they were doing bsky in part because they didn't like ActivityPub as a protocol.
I mean, I'm sure they really just wanted to control the protocol development more than anything, not liking the protocol was what they said. It was meant to be a direct competitor to Mastodon from day one.
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.
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.
I can never find a straight answer to this - which may be the answer in and of itself - but do they plan to federate with anyone besides themselves in the future?
They aren't using ActivityPub, what Mastodon and Lemmy use, they're using their own new protocol called AT (Authenticated Transfer). So it's less that they don't plan on federating with anybody else, and more that there's nobody to federate with. Maybe somebody else might pickup AT in the future, but AT is still a work in progress and there isn't a lot of incentive for anybody to do so yet.
I believe the idea is that they're not federating with any other existing site, they're creating a new variety of federation with themselves as the first member, with people being able to set themselves up as additional independent nodes in that federation.
So Federation lets you move your data, but that's it? It still has global moderation and from what it sounds like all accounts are still dependent on the original BlueSky server to login. So if it goes down, doesn't that just take all servers with it?
It is more complicated than that. There are multiple different server components that make up Bluesky and its federation. The PDS (Person Data Server) is what they’re mostly talking about in that press release. You can however run all three major server components yourself and setup a completely separate network that would then federate with Bluesky proper. It’s quite different to Mastodon and other ActivityPub services (where you setup a Mastodon, Lemmy, WriteFreely, etc… instance and then federate).
Still, at present it does feel a little pointless.