I would like to use Bluesky.
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@bnewbold @pluralistic Can you switch bgs/relay and still stay in touch. Or run your own? AIUI the relay is the hard part.
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@bnewbold In my last correspondence with the Bluesky dev team (5/14/24), they said:
> Getting another org outside of Bluesky PBC to run the Relay and Application service infra (mentioned above) in prod is the next milestone for de-risking the network.
I have been watching the announcements to see if this is done, and haven't seen anything or heard anything.
Is it the case that this is now live and functional?
Thanks.
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Evan Prodromoureplied to Cory Doctorow last edited by
@pluralistic thanks for this great post!
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@joakimfors @pluralistic yes, there can be many independent relays in play, and all interactions continue to work.
conceptually, relays are many-to-many: users/PDS didn't really "choose" a specific relay; all full-network relays crawl the whole network and are interchangeable. other services can make use of multiple relays for redundancy
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@pluralistic that is still the situation: there is not a serious peer service provider operating those services in the network for the microblogging modality.
there is nothing preventing it: we support adversarial interop in the live network today, but no "adversary" has emerged.
hobbyists have run full-scale components as proofs of concept. there are fully independent apps (like smokesignals and whtwnd), and independent projects which index/store the full network (like clearsky)
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@bnewbold All right, please do let me know when that changes.
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Olivier Simard-Casanova 🦋replied to bryan newbold last edited by
@bnewbold @pluralistic I agree
Another part that I find particularly confusing is this
On Mastodon, moving to a different instance means that you lose all your posts
Moving also requires your previous instance to be online. If your previous instance is offline, your account is gone.
That’s two massive "switching costs" in my opinion
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Olivier Simard-Casanova 🦋replied to Olivier Simard-Casanova 🦋 last edited by
On Bluesky, moving your PDS moves everything, including your posts
Moving also doesn’t rely on AppViews being online
The piece feels a lot more severe towards Bluesky than it is towards Mastodon, and I think this discrepancy significantly diminishes its impact (even though it’s overall a good piece that makes a lot of important points)
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@pluralistic @bnewbold what does that change for you materially? Will you make corrections in your blogpost and threads? As you made statements that lack full context
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damonreplied to Olivier Simard-Casanova 🦋 last edited by@o_simardcasanova @bnewbold @pluralistic They won’t address that as it kills the marketing. They don’t tell people that you don’t own your data unless you self host, they claim you own your social graph yet never state that it’s predicated on a admin not blocking your instance and keeping their instance live. Seems like a lot of downsides as well especially for creators, journalists, writers etc
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Erlend Sogge Heggenreplied to bryan newbold last edited by
@bnewbold @pluralistic isn’t this missing a crucial detail?
The whole reason why those 100k users can be switched across service providers so easily is because all of their ID keys (did:plc) are stored on the singular Bluesky-operated https://plc.directory
That key-ownership does not change with the move, so complete Bluesky-independence has not happened yet in this case. Those users are still dependent on an essential piece of Bluesky-infrastructure.
