A machine learning librarian at Hugging Face just released a dataset composed of one million Bluesky posts, complete with when they were posted and who posted them, intended for machine learning research.
Daniel van Strien posted about the dataset on Bluesky on Tuesday:
“This dataset contains 1 million public posts collected from Bluesky Social’s firehose API, intended for machine learning research and experimentation with social media data,” the dataset description says. “Each post contains text content, metadata, and information about media attachments and reply relationships.”
The data isn’t anonymous. In the dataset, each post is listed alongside the users’ decentralized identifier, or DID; van Strien also made a search tool for finding users based on their DID and published it on Hugging Face. A quick skim through the first few hundred of the million posts shows people doing normal types of Bluesky posting—arguing about politics, talking about concerts, saying stuff like “The cat is gay” and “When’s the last time yall had Boston baked beans?”—but the dataset has also swept up a lot of adult content, too.
From what I understand of the protocol, the federation just isn’t the same but provides some of the same benefits. Im not an expert, correct if wrong.
Essentially when I looked into it, the main benefits are stuff I actually prefer as opposed to the current implementation on fediverse in some regards.
The main idea being that users own their data on their own server (or collective server) and can choose to remove or take that data elsewhere to different apps or potentially even accounts. This is a lacking feature in the fediverse and it’s a common contention. If I get blocked on Lemmy or Mastodon, my data goes away. Especially since most people are not likely to host an instance themselves (since it’s an awful user experience) whereas BlueSky data can easily be stored by a third party that is trusted.
But yes you’re right, this still promotes large platforms. However again it gives users more control over what they host on which platforms and keeps their data in one place. That’s a huge advantage imo.
I don’t so much mind this future. It’s not quite the free speech platform that the fediverse is but it’s closer. Moderation can be much more lax and focus on TOS breaking or illegal things. And hey if at some point BlueSky is too woke or whatever the hell people say, they can literally pick up their server with their content and build an app elsewhere. The implementation is different but the end point is largely the same which is cool.
Im not an expert either, but both people in the above links are. They are both worth reading if you want to understand the platforms better.
As to blueskys user data portability, it’s part of the protocol to a degree, but it’s not a reality. The design is such that only megacorps/giant orgs can host the bluesky service. It doesnt really matter if your data is portable if no one will let you import it. Its akin to google reader and rss. People could export their rss feeds when google shut down google reader, but without an rss reader, it didn’t matter. That data had no usable context.
These is a drastic asymmetry problem with bluesky. It demands a giant player to gatekeep, whereas the fediverse lets anyone, anywhere add or even begin a network.
The Fediverse doesnt have a parallel of data portability at all, so even that lackluster implementation is something, but to both protocols defense, the Fediverse is talking about changes to activelypub to add this, and bluesky is attempting to make small services more possible.
Still, in all reality, neither of these platforms offers anything like that today, or likely in the near future.
Its akin to google reader and rss. People could export their rss feeds when google shut down google reader, but without an rss reader, it didn’t matter. That data had no usable context.
And much like a big RSS reader shutting down, being able to have the core data in a documented format that can be worked with makes it far easier for the community to build the tools they need to work with it and extract things they need from that blob of data.
You might not be able to easily jump to another social media platform, but you still have access to all your posts and history, and that has a lot of inherent value either way.
Maybe. An rss reader is a very basic service with an easy way to rebuild, but killing google reader still led in part to the death of rss as a viable platform. Its barely in use anymore as a protocol, even though there are plenty of options to run now. Bluesky is a wildly more difficult and expensive tool to reanimate and compete with than rss, so it might be even deader if they ever give up.
Having data in a dead format isn’t valuable. It’s like having 100 laserdiscs and no player. They don’t do anything but look shiny. That has some value, but it doesn’t do what it is supposed to.
