For a high-level introduction to data federation, as well as a comparison to other federated social protocols, check out the Bluesky blog.

cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/5484255

February 22, 2024 Bluesky writes:

Up until now, every user on the network used a Bluesky PDS (Personal Data Server) to host their data. We’ve already federated our own data hosting on the backend, both to help operationally scale our service, and to prove out the technical underpinnings of an openly federated network. But today we’re opening up federation for anyone else to begin connecting with the network.

The PDS, in many ways, fulfills a simple role: it hosts your account and gives you the ability to log in, it holds the signing keys for your data, and it keeps your data online and highly available. Unlike a Mastodon instance, it does not need to function as a full-fledged social media service. We wanted to make atproto data hosting—like web hosting—into a fairly simple commoditized service. The PDS’s role has been limited in scope to achieve this goal. By limiting the scope, the role of a PDS in maintaining an open and fluid data network has become all the more powerful.

We’ve packaged the PDS into a friendly distribution with an installer script that handles much of the complexity of setting up a PDS. After you set up your PDS and join the PDS Admins Discord to submit a request for your PDS to be added to the network, your PDS’s data will get routed to other services in the network (like feed generators and the Bluesky Appview) through our Relay, the firehose provider. Check out our Federation Overview for more information on how data flows through the atproto network.

Read Early Access Federation for Self-Hosters

  • Rikudou_Sage@lemmings.worldEnglish
    131·
    9 months ago

    So it’s a centrally controlled network? That doesn’t really seem like proper federation protocol.

    Or is it only to federate with their main instance? Meaning InstanceX and InstanceY can still federate with each other even without approval from the overlords.

    • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nlEnglish
      51·
      9 months ago

      It’s not centrally controlled, though. The main instance doesn’t automatically federate with everyone, just like Lemmy used to refuse federation unless other servers were whitelisted.

      You can set up a network of Bluesky servers without ever federating with the main Bluesky server if you want. You’ll just have no users.

      • ericjmorey@discuss.onlineOPEnglish
        61·
        9 months ago

        The more I’m reading into the docs, the more convinced I am that the AT protocol is better than ActivityPub.

        I wonder if there cound be a link aggregator and forum style implementation of the AT protocol, the same way that Lemmy did with the ActivityPub protocol.

        I wonder what sort of bridging can be implemented between AT Protocol and ActivityPub implementations.

        • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nlEnglish
          9·
          9 months ago

          AT has a lot of nice parts, and a lot of “wtf why” parts.

          It makes sense: AT was designed to be “Twitter, but also federateable” rather than ActivityPub’s “Federateable, so you can build things like Twitter”. ActivityPub is modular and much more customisable than AT, which was built closer to existing social media concepts.

          I’ve read somewhere that Friendica is working on an AT implementation, so I guess we’ll see how well federation actually works once that’s done.

          • ericjmorey@discuss.onlineOPEnglish
            5·
            9 months ago

            It will be interesting to see what Friendica devs come up with!

            I’ve just started looking at the AT protocol. What sort of WTF things are in there?

            • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nlEnglish
              4·
              9 months ago

              The inclusion of some kind of web3 identifier that never seemed to get used for web3 things comes to mind. The methodology of most federation work also seems to indicate that hosting an alternative server may require significantly more resources compared to an ActivityPub server, though this may be outdated information.

              I also don’t particularly like their moderation strategy. It seems very Nostr-like, and it’s more about hiding things than actually blocking things.

              They also felt like they needed to invent their own notation language to describe their protocol, which makes reading the protocol spec kind of weird.

              They also decided to use Javascript’s 53 bits of integer precision as an upper bound for their protocol. I certainly wouldn’t have designed my cross-platform protocol around the programming language I happened to choose.

              Lastly, Bluesky offers a flag to suggest clients hide your profile and posts, but doesn’t have the ability to hide that data. With ActivityPub, you can simply refuse to list posts and maintain some amount of privacy (especially combined with enabling follow requests), but AT doesn’t seem to care much about that.

          • Flaky@iusearchlinux.fyiEnglish
            5·
            9 months ago

            Yeah, from some cursory glances and following of AT devs, some things I understand the logic of and some things I’m thinking “isn’t this a bit over-engineered?”

        • spaduf@slrpnk.netEnglish
          5·
          9 months ago

          the more convinced I am that the AT protocol is better than ActivityPub.

          That’s because AT was very deliberately designed to solve problems with ActivityPub.

          I wonder what sort of bridging can be implemented between AT Protocol and ActivityPub implementations.

          The folks over at https://fed.brid.gy/ have been working at this. Much to the chagrin of the folks over at Mastodon.

    • ericjmorey@discuss.onlineOPEnglish
      2·
      9 months ago

      I haven’t dug into the details, but there seem to be a lot of blog posts and extensive documentation to figure it out.