Comment by 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.
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.
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.
right on, man, that must be the only way transcoding can be done and completely future proof so it will never change to let the user transcode their own damn content. I get it; you're frustrated so you're nitpicking. funny how dang doesn't swoop in to tut tut you for not steelmanning instead of strawmanning.
in any case, you're completely right about the activity pub comment. that was absolutely mockery and not actually a complaint. artistic license and all that. god forbid we express ourselves. but sure, I can recognize that AT proto is useful in that it provides mechanisms we didn't really have before. that said, it's not novel (just new) and it's not irreplaceable. LIKE I SAID: there's always another protocol.
any time you want to actually address the point of the comments, I'd be happy to get your take on why it's fine, actually, for the CEO to imply she doesn't have to care what users think as long as they aren't paying her. but if you're not ready to have the real conversation, I'll let you be satisfied with whatever other potshots you want to take at my reasonable indignation.