I thought this was slightly funny.
Mark Zuckerberg is known these days for wearing t-shirts with Latin phrases on them, especially ones where he compares himself to Julius Caesar.
Bluesky made a shirt in the same style, but theirs says “a world without Caesars” in Latin.
Fair - you could host a copy or a link (or a sort of combination between the two, I guess), but it wouldn’t transfer the ownership of the original post. I’m still not sure this is such a pressing feature that I accept it as the actual raison d’etre of AT proto, especially considering how it very much exists there only in theory at best. But it is interesting technology, and something they could maybe have worked with ActivityPub to try to achieve.
I’m glad to hear that maybe Bluesky is more decentralized than I suspect, but Bluesky engineer whose blog post you linked still links to his bluesky account on bsky.social. If running a separate instance is achievable, I would love to see people actually do it.
My understanding is that running most of BlueSky is possible on small to moderate hardware. However, running all of BlueSky requires basically cloning 100% of all the content on BlueSky (which, as of Nov 2024, was ~5 TB).
So, like, yes, one can run part of BlueSky or a clone of BlueSky which has none of the main instance’s user’s content without much trouble, but actually running an entire BlueSky stack is eventually going to become cost prohibitive.
I found this write-up to be enlightening on the subject.
You full on misunderstand the protocol. The .bsky.social subdomain does not denote what “instance” you are on. There are no instances on atproto. That user could be self hosting all there data and still use that subdomain. It’s not mutually exclusive. Atproto is far more atomic than AP.
Right. I guess that’s similar with bridged users - you see them on bsky.app, even though they are actually located elsewhere.
What I struggle with is seeing the decentralization in practice, when the only place I can ever see AT proto in action is when Bluesky users are bridged to the fediverse. Bluesky has a shitload of users and there are a bunch of people jumping on the technology - why is there not so much as an understandable proof of concept out there?
On ActivityPub it’s so easy to understand. “See this post? Well, here’s the same post on some other domain, hosted by other people”.
I don’t understand how Bluesky can be this difficult to understand, yet apparently fulfil such a fundamental need.
It’s fairly easy to understand but you won’t really see it and that by design. The point is to make the underpinning so seamless that it feels like a centralized app. The proof of concept is Bluesky, but if you would like to see other services that are completely unaffiliated with Bluesky PBC than check out:
- whtwnd.com (Whitewind)
- A longform blogging platform that has its own Lexicon and AppView
- pinksea.art (Pinksea)
- An oekaki BBS with its own lexicon and CDN implementation
- tangled.sh (Tangled)
- A git forge integrated with atproto, they even have made some additions with regards to knots.
All of these and many more are being built along with infrasstucture plays from the like of Blacksky, Northsky, and Free our Feeds.
