I would like to give an update on "federation" on Bluesky.

This is why—although, now Blacksky is letting me "see through" Bluesky's worst moderation decisions, I'm glad, because Bluesky's moderation is weird and arbitrary—I think it's a downside of the network, and Mastodon made the right decision not offering this feature. Fediverse defederation forces a degree of soft group consensus on moderation: it's possible to say "if you're talking to X, I don't want to talk to *you*". On Bluesky we are all ghosts walking through walls and this can't be enforced

@mcc I guess you could simultaneously see this as a success and a failure for ATproto: decentralization is possible... but you immediately get a lot of the same problems ActivityPub has that ATProto ostensibly solved.

:frogsiren: BLUESKY HAS OFFICIALLY NETSPLIT :frogsiren:

There has always been more than one Fediverse. Different instances make different moderation decisions so some instances can't see posts by some users.

There has only ever been one Bluesky because every ATProto frontend uses the same Appview.

It is January 2026 and that's no longer true; Blacksky's Appview is available for beta use and there is at least 1 user banned on Bluesky but not Blacksky. And vice versa.

https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:w4xbfzo7kqfes5zb7r6qv3rw/post/3mcozwdhjos2b

:frogsiren: BLUESKY HAS OFFICIALLY NETSPLIT :frogsiren:

There has always been more than one Fediverse. Different instances make different moderation decisions so some instances can't see posts by some users.

There has only ever been one Bluesky because every ATProto frontend uses the same Appview.

It is January 2026 and that's no longer true; Blacksky's Appview is available for beta use and there is at least 1 user banned on Bluesky but not Blacksky. And vice versa.

https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:w4xbfzo7kqfes5zb7r6qv3rw/post/3mcozwdhjos2b

@mcc What's the monthly cost on maintaining several terabytes of data in perpetuity?

@lrhodes Depends on how you do it I imagine. But remember that's several terabytes for the like what, three years or something Bluesky has been running. We will expect it to grow endlessly, and we should expect the growth to grow endlessly as Bluesky becomes more popular.

What I saw happen when Black Twitter came to Fediverse is attempts to build community resources— like shared cross-instance blocklist infrastructure— get demonized by white queers as being anti-queer (because they, personally, wound up moderated— due to, as far as I saw, entirely real racism). I saw multiple projects shut down or hobbled by this and good people driven off fedi. I don't know if any devs from that era are involved in the new Bluesky efforts. But the Bluesky efforts *are* thriving.

@mcc Yeah. I don't see how that's sustainable. I'm not sure it's even sustainable for Bluesky.

@gbargoud Sure. You could do that. I'm aware of a patch to the PDS (backend) software that allows it to flat out publish via ActivityPub. I haven't seen a *frontend* that merges the streams yet though.

There's also the problem that you can't reeeallly monitor *just part* of the Bluesky network. To follow part of it you're supposed to drink the entire firehose and filter out the parts you care about.

@mcc @gbargoud cc'ing @gabboman who has integrated bluesky and blacksky and activitypub into one timeline/account on #WAFRN