That’s just life on the Internet/fediverse in general, there’s a constant churn of the small websites/instances as people inevitably burn out. You gotta be mentally prepared for it. I’m really sad since .ee was one of the few good instances that federated with the unpopular ones too

The only solution is improvements to the protocol so migrating instances is less painful. A different form of identity (key-based rather than domain based) would be cool to let us keep handles across instances

Maybe, but for now the culture is extremely hostile to *brands*. They successfully bullied Adobe inc off the site

There’s no ads on bsky tho D:

Blocking them actually is removing their ability to affect your mood 😌

This is false, they support did:web which ties your identity to ownership of a DNS name (which is its own can of worms, but not controlled by bluesky like PLC).

Unless you mean that you still have to register your pds it to get indexed by the relay, so people can read your posts without querying your server directly (which is possible but discouraged). This is actually an advantage over mastodon/activitypub however, your personal pds will not crash if a post goes viral (unlike a personal mastodon instance).

They support did:web too if you don’t like did:plc

The implementation details matter tho, your instance admin actively makes federation decisions that affect the content you see. I like to explain joining an instance as pledging yourself to a warlord in medieval Japan

Peertube allegedly uses p2p networking that runs in your browser to serve videos. It’s open source but when I tried to actually read up on the protocol large parts of the docs were in french

It was by the largest (by a fair margin) socialist-aligned subreddit, but in practice it was like 60% shitposts. Was originally associated with the eponymous podcast, but the hosts have repeatedly said they disliked it.

they were originally refugees from the reddit ban of r/chapotraphouse (which, while cringy, was not nearly as bad as r/the_donald that got banned in the same wave. but the reddit admins had a thing for being “fair and balanced”)

yep literally this. don’t most routers nowadays have a dns server with a hosts file you can edit?

Did you know we have these things called computer files that can store information. There’s even one in your router specifically for storing IP addresses

Yes, this is the strongest argument against it and the biggest flaw. They keep saying in interviews that they are treating their future selves as adversaries and they do open source most everything but I would be a lot happier if the protocol development was spun off into a separate org from the for profit service. If it dies, this will be what killed it. But I hope they make it (by it I mean the tools for everyone else to make the ecosystem).

Yes, and I’ve been yelling at them about the problem of scaling down for a while, since the same “relay” service needs to be both a firehose and a full mirror. This requirement (and thus scalability) of running a relay is becoming a big problem even for the main devs. According to them however you can mitigate this to a reasonable amount for a home lab (~8 cores, 16gb ram, ~2Tb ssdl) if you simply don’t store any backlog and just retransmit posts https://bsky.app/profile/why.bsky.team/post/3lbjdux6ubc2f

This is what they’re doing internally to manage the load and are also working on implementing relay sharding/scoping to let you just index a small slice of the network, which should eliminate the problem. https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/discussions/3036 and here’s someone implementing a proof of concept third party version https://bsky.app/profile/pet.bun.how/post/3lbwnx2rxxs2o

It’s true that the main devs’ priorities are building the large scale parts first and then worrying about downscaling, the whole point was always to replace twitter and work at a similar scale, which requires hard tradeoffs. I do worry that they’ll run out of money before they can do the work to let the ecosystem become sustainable by itself.

But I have faith (for now) because they have people I know from when they worked on secure-ssb and dat protcols, which are truly decentralized but never took off for other reasons.

Thats the opposite of what I said. You can use the same data with multiple services at the same time, in fact this is already possible. The whole thing would be kinda pointless otherwise.

The entire point is that your pds can interact with multiple “instances” of bluesky or whatever other apps people build on the protocol.

For example there is a reddit/hn clone that people can post on (keeping their same identity) when the official bluesky service goes down. The reddit clone is fully independent from the twitter clone, but they use the same protocol and (unlike AP) the same hosting and authentication infrastructure.

Whereas on Lemmy and mastodon, my accounts are totally separate. And unlike AP, your data lives on your own pds and is never hostage to the owner of the instance that actually runs the load bearing interactivity. If they become compromised or shut down you can switch to another. No cooperation from the old owner required (unlike activitypub).

Bluesky is not making a reddit alternative, a third party developer is using their hosting/auth infrastructure.

https://bsky.app/profile/frontpage.fyi
https://github.com/likeandscribe/frontpage

I asked the devs about this and they said that bluesky is designed to be a) modular b) trustless as much as possible. federation is supposed to happen on the trustless hosting and relay layers - you can ask your posts to be crawled by any indexer/appview.

But once you get to the indexing/querying layer, there are no more merkle proofs to keep everyone honest, so there is no point in federating because any indexer can modify/censor the content they send to another indexer instance. So you could still build an api to interact laterally between servers, but it wouldn’t be atproto anymore.