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Comment by catapart

8 hours ago

yeah yeah yeah, everyone get on the AT protocol, so that the bluesky org can quickly get all of these filthy users off of their own servers (which costs money) while still maintaining the original, largest, and currently only portal to actually publish the content (which makes money[0]). let them profit from a technical "innovation" that is 6 levels of indirection to mimic activity pub.

if they were decent people, that would be one thing. but if they're going to be poisoned with the same faux-libertarian horseshit that strangled twitter, I don't see any value in supporting their protocol. there's always another protocol.

but assuming I was willing to play ball and support this protocol, they STILL haven't solved the actual problem that no one else is solving either: your data exists somewhere else. until there's a server that I can bring home and plug in with setup I can do using my TV's remote, you're not going to be able to move most people to "private" data storage. you're just going to change which massive organization is exploiting them.

I know, I know: hardware is a bitch and the type of device I'm even pitching seems like a costly boondoggle. but that's the business, and if you're not addressing it, you're not fomenting real change; you're patting yourself on the back for pretending we can algorithm ourselves out of late-stage capitalism.

[0] *potentially/eventually

14 comments

catapart

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danabramov  6 hours ago

>that the bluesky org can quickly get all of these filthy users off of their own servers (which costs money)

That's not correct, actually hosting user data is cheap. Most users' repos are tiny. Bluesky doesn't save anything by having someone move to their own PDS.

What's expensive is stuff like video processing and large scale aggregation. Which has to be done regardless of where the user is hosting their data.

  • catapart  4 hours ago

    come on, man, let's be real. you're talking modern, practical application; I'm talking reasonable user buy in at big boy social media levels. the video hosting IS what I'm talking about being expensive. you think bsky is going to be successfully while ignoring the instagram crowd forever? what are we doing here?

    bsky saves the video processing and bandwidth by not hosting that content on bsky. it's a smaller problem, but in a large enough pool, images become heavy, too. and, either way, the egress of that content is expensive if you're doing it for the entire world, instead of letting each individual's computer (their pds) do it.

    I'm happy to admit that text is cheap and bsky isn't looking to offload their data as it stands now. but let's be honest about the long term, which is what my original comment takes aim at.

    • danabramov  3 hours ago

      I still don't think this is correct. The Bluesky app always processes video, whether you're self-hosting or not. The personal data serves stores the original blob, but the Bluesky's video service will have to pick it up and transcode it (to serve it from CDN) either way.

      Also, this:

      >let them profit from a technical "innovation" that is 6 levels of indirection to mimic activity pub.

      is also wrong because AT solves completely different problems. None of the stuff I wrote about in the post can be solved or or is being solved by ActivityPub. Like, AP is just message passing. It doesn't help with aggregation, identity, signing, linking cross-application data, any of that.

      1 reply →

lou1306  8 hours ago

> until there's a server that I can bring home and plug in with setup I can do using my TV's remote, you're not going to be able to move most people to "private" data storage

Quite some BSky users are publishing on their own PDS (Personal Data Server) right now. They have been for a while. There are already projects that automate moving or backign up your PDS data from BSky, like https://pdsmoover.com/

  • catapart  3 hours ago

    yeah, I was one of them. developers are not the endgame, though. true social media needs people who are not going to do anything more complicated than "go to website, sign up". there's no world where setting up your own pds is that simple without an organized piece of software to do that kind of thing.

    personally, I could probably get behind recommending something like umbrel[0], if it included something like a "include a pds" option during config. but even that is asking for a lot of mind-share for a non-tech user. it would take a super smooth setup process for that to be realistic. point is, though, I'm not saying it can't be done; I'm saying no one is doing it and what people are doing is not getting the job done for wider adoption.

    [0] https://umbrel.com/ *and, naturally, at this point, I'd prefer they include something that isn't based on AT proto for social publication. I wouldn't mind if they had both, but just an AT proto implementation wouldn't attract me.

  • avsm  7 hours ago

    Microblogging is also the least interesting part of the ATProto ecosystem. I've switched all my git hosting over to https://tangled.org and am loving it, not least of which is that my git server (a 'knot' in Tangled parlance) is under my control as a PDS and has no storage limits!