Is BlueSky similar to the Fediverse? No.

The Fediverse is owned by the people and communities that use it. A basic server costs $5 a month all inclusive, anyone can make one. It's ad-free, made by volunteers, funded by donations, servers are independent.

BlueSky is a for-profit corporation funded by VC money. Its technical structure makes servers dependent on expensive corporate-run relays. BlueSky's business setup is eerily reminiscent of Ello: https://waxy.org/2024/01/the-quiet-death-of-ellos-big-dreams/

#Fediverse #BlueSky

@thenexusofprivacy @FediTips individual servers being owned by a company is not an issue. Said corporations controlling the network would be.

@oblomov @thenexusofprivacy

Yeah, those examples you give aren't really the same thing.

On BlueSky there aren't just corporate servers, but the infrastructure itself is designed to be run by corporations. You are forced to pipe your content via corporations, in effect.

On the Fediverse, you can completely ignore or even block corporate servers, there's no need to have anything to do with them. Every server is totally independent, and connect to each other directly.

@FediTips @oblomov @thenexusofprivacy I agree with your analysis. Could you explain further how the BlueSky infrastructure was designed to be managed by corporations, since the AT protocol is theoretically "open"?

@skarnio @oblomov @thenexusofprivacy

The AT protocol created for BlueSky depends on "relays", which are expensive to run, which in effect means corporations would run them. BS servers cannot work without being connected to these relays, so BS is effectively forcing everyone to be connected to corporations.

More details at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT_Protocol#Relays_and_the_firehose

There's no clear financial incentive for corporations to run relays, so presumably they are expected to extract data and/or insert advertising.

@FediTips @skarnio @oblomov @thenexusofprivacy

you can run a full network relay on atproto for 150 usd per month

https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3kwzl7tye6u2y

@FediTips @skarnio @oblomov @thenexusofprivacy

the expensive part is the appview, but that scales fairly linearly with the amount of users that the appview has. the appview is expensive for bluesky because it serves 4M mau. if you want a small appview that takes the relay and serves a small userbase you can do that for cheap on a VPS

@laurenshof @FediTips @skarnio @thenexusofprivacy that's monstrously expensive. masto.host basic plan is 6$/month. GoToSocial is even cheaper to host.

@oblomov @FediTips @skarnio @thenexusofprivacy

those are completely different things.

the closest comparison is hosting your own PDS on atproto, which is even cheaper than that.

But fundamentally, atproto has a different network architecture, where it splits network storage/identity away from the frontend software.

ATproto is: data storage (PDS, anyone can run one, decentralised), aggregated into full network relay, processed by appview into microblogging app

@laurenshof @skarnio @thenexusofprivacy no, a self-hosted PDS is not the closest comparison to a self-hosted instance, because a self-hosted ActivityPub server is sufficient to fully join the network, a self-hosted PDS in atproto is *not*, which is exactly the point me and @FediTips have been making. atproto is designed to depend on corporate (= expensive) relays to work. A PDS alone is useless.

@laurenshof @oblomov @FediTips @thenexusofprivacy But doesn't the ZOT protocol do this?

@oblomov @skarnio @thenexusofprivacy @FediTips

other products build on atproto, such as event planner smokesignal.events, skip the relay altogether and do not use the relay at all. I am not 100% sure but I think linkaggregator Frontpage.fyi skips the relay as well. So not, it is not designed to be dependent on that, it is an optimalisation part for Bluesky.

@laurenshof @oblomov @skarnio @thenexusofprivacy @FediTips

Both of those are still AppViews, which are more expensive to run than Relays.

While PDSs (write access to the network) are indeed cheap, read access definitely is not, especially since the cost scales with total network activity for each reader with the current PDS and Relay features.

Not saying that it's a bad protocol per se, because there is clear demand for global indexing and singleton frontends and ActivityPub is bad at those aspects, but the protocol economics are completely prohibitive for most indie participants in terms of providing unenshittified end user access.

@Qazm @oblomov @skarnio @thenexusofprivacy @FediTips

smokesignal runs on a 10 dollar/month VPS right now, from my understanding frontpage to be very similar. like i said, appview costs scale fairly linearly with the amount of users they have to serve. just like you can build a small server for a few people on fedi for cheap, if you want you can build a small appview on atproto for a few people for cheap. obviously expensive if you want to serve millions of ppl tho