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

mcc

Oh and I can't get staging.blacksky on my phone app. So imagine if you were using Mastodon, but you saw a slightly different list of posters, *and potentially a different set of your own posts*, depending on whether you were using your PC or your phone. This is great if there's a banned user you want to follow— you get an *option* to follow them. Mastodon.social can deny me the *option* to follow someone, on Fediverse. But except in this edge case that *might* not be a fantastic user experience!

mcc

@coracinho Does this help? https://mastodon.social/@mcc/115918101156654032

mcc

@fabrice This is a VERY interesting question, as the answer appears to be "all of them". And when Link got banned, *that answer appeared to be surprising even to Bluesky employees*. The original messaging from Bluesky suggested you'd get banned only by the "labeler"— a third thing altogether. But there's obvious problems with that answer, it's never what Bluesky implemented. After Link got banned Bluesky said they were reviewing this, but I don't think *changed* anything.

mcc

Oh, and let's consider, for a moment, the downsides of an individual user being able to "opt out" of moderation decisions. The problem with misbehavior on social media is force multipliers. One person harassing you is no problem; one person and their 3000 friends is a big problem. Imagine Bluesky and Blacksky ban user X but Trumpsky lets X keep posting. Now their 3000 friends— still in Bluesky's good graces— can see their posts calling to harass you, AND can zero-friction zip over to yell at you

Ratsnake Games 🔞

@mcc is

is Trumpsky a real thing

mcc

@ratsnakegames No

Ratsnake Games 🔞

@mcc phew, you had me worried for a second there was another one of Those Bloody Things

mcc

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

crab

@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.

mcc

@operand However, they experience those problems in a *completely different way*, which not only is their userbase unprepared for, but the pre-existing experience of fediverse users does not exactly prepare for!

eblu

@mcc oh that's sick. congrats to blacksky for making it

⁂ L. Rhodes

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

mcc

@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.

⁂ L. Rhodes

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

hallvors

@mcc sad stuff Thanks for the history lesson and analysis.

mcc

@lrhodes Twitter managed it, but they had a revenue stream, which Bluesky doesn't

wakest ⁂

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

gabboman the wafrn dev

This post is 4 months old hehe.

At this moment we are making our own red dwarf style post fetching, wich is done directly on the PDS