This is big. Bluesky is getting lots of traction with normies who want off Twitter. Mastodon and pleroma and pixelfed all about to become much more discoverable
this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2025
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We pretty much had this when the first reliable Mastodon<->Bluesky bridge came online. The Fediverse side protested and made the entire system opt-in, making it practically unusable because people that don't have a favourite Linux distro don't know what a fedi is and why they should bridge to it.
When this goes live, I expect people to treat it the same as every other sizeable social media joining the Fediverse, with outrange and block lists.
Why would they protest and make it opt in? The whole point of the fediverse is that your posts are completely public. Literally anyone and anything can scrape it, your server would hand it to them on a silver platter. That's the point.
I've once been downvoted to oblivion for not defederating threads.com before it even went online. Fediverse people are weird.
Eh, I think rejecting anything associated with Meta seems perfectly normal for people trying to get away from corporate social media.
And I think letting everyone decide for themselves how they run their instances and who they federate with is an important cornerstone of the fediverse. I'm more than fine with people not wanting to interact with threads. But what happens on my tiny instance with me as the only active user shouldn't be cause for outrage.
I fully agree with that. Personal choice is a big part of what the fediverse is a big part of what the fediverse is about, after all.
My unpopular opinion is that we should federate with threads. "Embrace extend extinguish" would depend on existing fediverse users migrating to threads. Quite frankly, I don't see that happening. In fact, if there's no federation, there's more incentive to use threads to have a presence.
Embrace extend extinguish, if done on the fediverse, may cause an uptick in signups on other instances, and when extinguished, a portion of those users would leave.
With the Google Chat / XMPP thing, people were using Google Chat, had xmpp support, it was cool, then google pulled the rug so users seemingly dropped.
I don't think Meta has enough goodwill at all to even convince it's own users to return to it's platforms these days. I think Bluesky is more of a risk as it claims to be decentralised to rope people in, but isn't.
Because it happens everytime. They accuse people of "scraping the fediverse".
people that don't have a favourite Linux distro
Mere mortals
I dunno. I still posts from the Bluesky bridge getting boosts. This might not be as bad Threads.
This might not be as bad Threads.
Tbd but bluesky is at least pretending for now that it is user focused.
So this can be symbiotic
Isn't that part of the benefit of federating, too? If Bluesky turns heel, just cut it back off again.
Watch then deny it cos it will threaten their market capture lol
They'll say something like "can't handle the scale"
You shouldn't expect full interoperability with this alone! At most, you should expect that your public posts get shared with your followers on Mastodon (i.e. an outbox)
fart noises
Really cool honestly. How big it is is probably predicated on if Bluesky enabled it for PDS'es on bsky.social.
That's the benefit of Bluesky being totally centralized, not built with any capability for federation: When they decide to add some, they can hardly fail to see that it's best to go with ActivityPub.
Thats completely untrue :) .
app.wafrn.net is a separate app that connects to bluesky, atproto.africa is an alternate relay, deer.social is an alt appview.
You can use bluesky without relying on bluesky now.
Hmm, let's see if I remember the terminology correctly:
Client apps have nothing to do with it, obviously.
Alternate appviews have nothing to do with it, except in that they'd presumably need to work with whatever form of atproto federation exists, if any did.
Alternate relays aren't federated unless there's some protocol for routing messages between them — such as ActivityPub.
So, bluesky works differently to fedi.
A PDS stores your posts/comments/likes/blocks/articles/whatever. These all get crawled and saved to a relay.
An appview connects to a relay and sorts through all the posts, and indexes them.
They handle all the interactions, rather than passing messages between servers.
Let me just ask the less technical and more important questions:
- If BSky goes out of business and shuts down their servers, will these continue to function?
- Does BSky still have any control at all over moderation?
If bsky goes out of business and shuts down their servers, will these continue to function?
Yes, but there will be far less people since everyone's on bsky.social. Kinda like mastodon.social.
Does bsky still have any control at all over moderation?
Great question! Bluesky has individual moderation services you can subscribe to, and these hide/label posts for you.
bsky has no control over moderation if you are not on their servers, and you are not subscribed to their moderation service.
Right... it did take me a minute to remember how the relays work. Well, when there are a few hundred of them we'll see how it goes.
There's a good few small ones.
It can work without relays anyway, an appview can crawl PDSes directly.
Really? I thought there were only two. How are the small ones able to afford the bandwidth to monitor everything from every PDS?
because hosting a full-network relay is super cheap, including bandwidth. there are multiple people who are running full-network relays (monitoring and relaying everything from every PDS) for less than 30USD per month
Well that's an interesting development, which people seem to have begun experimenting with in the past few weeks. Of course for the time being I suppose it's made somewhat easier for the relays by 99% of the users being hosted on the small collection of official bsky.network PDS servers.
Some more discussion of it in which there may be hints as to how atproto people might slowly progress towards reinventing some of the things we take for granted on the fediverse.
This news probably deserve its own post
i think the main takeaway is that the fediverse has hugely overindexed on relays being this big huge centralising force in the atproto network. And thats simply not true at all. The flipside of that is that relays also dont really matter much either. All they do is simply aggregating from a distributed network of data storage into a single firehose. Its really cool that you can do that for super cheap. but its also just a small part of the entire network architecture. like, atproto relays are not CDNs, for example, and video CDNs are expensive to run.
Definitely. Posting https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lo7a2a4qxg2l as its own post would probably help
The main centralised part of bluesky right now is their decentralised identifiers right now.
DID:PLC is completely centralised. Its not actually a requirement for a did to be decentralised.
plc.directory is the only registry for them right now.
That's why I said small ones, they don't crawl the entire network.
There is the freeourfeeds one coming soon.
If they don't crawl the entire network then most of the network cannot contact them at all? Which makes it ... not really a network. That's where federation would come in.
It does federate though, federation is multiple nodes in a network cooperating, which they do.
HTTP is a network even though it doesn't (usually) federate.