this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2025
208 points (93.3% liked)
Fediverse memes
1768 readers
584 users here now
Memes about the Fediverse.
Rules
General
- Be respectful
- Post on topic
- No bigotry or hate speech
Specific
- We are not YPTB. If you have a problem with the way an instance or community is run, then take it up over at !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com.
- Addendum: Yes we know that you think ml/hexbear/grad are tankies and or .world are a bunch of liberals but it gets old quickly. Try and come up with new material.
Elsewhere in the Fediverse
Other relevant communities:
- !fediverse@lemmy.world
- !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- !lemmydrama@lemmy.world
- !fediverselore@lemmy.ca
- !bestofthefediverse@lemmy.ca
- !fedigrow@lemmy.zip
founded 10 months ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It did make good on true federation.
Isn't their federation really fucking weird though? Like you can't run a federated server unless you're capable of handling 100% of all the posts on the entire platform? That's a pretty huge barrier, and one could argue it's less "federation" and more "mirroring".
Personally, its as simple as the ATProtocol is hard connected to Bluesky full stop. If Bluesky goes under, then AT will definitely suffer or fail.
The fediverse (AKA ActivityPub) is not reliant on just one entity, its many many entities implementing the same protocol. So its MUCH more resilient than AT.
But the good news is that we don't need to choose, as long as AP and AT both exist and keep going its going to be fine. The only issue becomes if services start only using AT over AP. Then we get a Microsoft situation where embrace extend extinguish occurs and we all become reliant on one not so benevolent corporation.
Im still going to root for the more open source protocol for the above reasons.
Do you mean it's reliant in some sort of technical way, or just that it is currently so dominated by BS that it's hard to meaningfully separate the protocol from the platform in practice? Kinda like if ML was 90% of the Lemmy market share?
Both protocols are open source.
At can exist without bluesky, but most people are on it. I wouldn't say it's "hard connected" to it.
Also: there are various implementations of Atproto.
Lets agree to disagree.
Ive seen many times where the company behind a tech goes under and the tech suffers because of it. And AT seems to be hard connected to Bluesky given the wikipedia article and the codebase that I have seen. But having competing services is not necessarily a bad thing. It can mean they can both learn from one another (like yarn and npm did a long time ago) and we get a better service. I dont necessarily want AT to fail, but I do want them to become MUCH more distant to Bluesky.
And they have the most risk to become Enshittied given the crypto/investors/millionaires involved with BlueSky.
Ill still be supporting AP with my development time since its easier for me to stand up and work with.
If mastodon disappeared tomorrow it would be chaos. Loads of servers would shut down, and the rest would switch to a fork.
It would do irreapable damage to the fediverse, since mastodon basically controls the spec (the w3 thing is more of a collection of suggestions).
AT is infinietly easier to work with as well.
Again as a Dev, I have to disagree.
How can mastodon disappear? By definition, its on open platforms and self hosted solutions. It cant. And we are using the spec to talk right now.
And as a Dev AT really isn't easier to work with. I've tried hooking it up multiple times and while I can do it, its such a pain. And debug is pretty terrible experience. But its a an opinion on both sides.
You seem very invested in the protocol. Why if I may ask?
Have you built anything on AP? It's a pain. A poorly documented headache inducing pain.
I didn't say mastodon would disappear, I said it would cause irreparable damage to the network. Bluesky/atproto won't disappear without Bluesky PBC, but it would cause irreparable damage to the network.
Obviously mastodon is in a better position for this to happen.
I'm not really invested in the protocol, I prefer AP honestly, but everyone here is annoyingly elitest about the fediverse.
Yep! Your using it now ;) at least a very little bit if your URL is correct.
A little bit of what? sorry, this makes no sense to me.
Lemmy.
Oh, right.
Yep, I like piefed a bit more. Much easier to work with and code is very well done. But I helped a bit on Lemmy back in the day. And some other fedi services. A very very small amount. Other devs are much more impressive.
I also tried creating a couple of AT services and helped a tiny bit of doc work. Didn't work out because of a variety of things. Mostly the pipes/thoughput you need, but also the setup. At the time there was no generic docker setup.
Anyways more than anyone wanted to know about all that. Now I just fart around on here.
Have you looked into jetstream?
I haven't. This it? https://gojetstream.io/docs/jetstream-api/2.9.3/index.html
No, this is: https://docs.bsky.app/blog/jetstream (probably should have linked to it, sorry :/ ) tl;dr, allows server side filtering, and uses json instead of DAG-CBOR
Ah yeah Google didn't come up with that. Coo
No. Their federation does differ from the fediverse's, essentially, people have PDSes (personal data servers) which are just dumb datastores. These store data like your posts, likes, follows and blocks publicly.
AppViews are the other part, these take the data from PDSes and index it, and sort out interactions/notifications.
AppViewLite, for example, can be self hosted on any computer, and can be set to only take posts from select users, and discard posts after a while.
Is this federation, though? I've always thought of federation as a technical description of a platform's network topology, that it is several nodes communicating with one another to provide an overall platform.
Like, an AppViewLite is basically analogous to a Nostr replay and no one describes Nostr as federated.
A more interesting conversation is whether grafting federation onto Bluesky is worth the effort. If indexing the network can be done for a reasonable price, which it seems to be, then I don't see why people would put in the effort. If an app view/relay goes bad then you can just switch and get mostly the same experience.
I still believe that the ActivityPub solution of the multi stakeholder platform is a better direction, but I don't think the Bluesky idea of super easy migration should be dismissed out of hand like it so often is on this side of the conversation.
Yeah, it's still federation. It's just pull-based rather than push based.
Bluesky was made to be a decentralised twitter from the beginning.
Meh, I still don't see it as federation, but that might just be me projecting my own definition. Like, if we accept that bsky is federated then that would mean Bing is federated, just for arbitrary HTML rather than predetermined JSON.
It depends on your definition of federation.
It's defined as: "A system where various entities collaborate and share resources".
Nodes definitely collaborate, and resources (data) is shared.
It didn’t, bluesy made it able to selfhost your posts to keep their hosting costs down
All the pros of federation and being able to self host an instance don’t exist on Bluesy so why would you?
No. Their hosting costs would be the same regardless of how many people self host.
You get all the benefits of self hosting from appviews.
If it did, ofcom would need to call up each person hosting content on the atprotocol, no, bluesky is the one and only that has affective access, with abilities to sensor, on your hosted content.
No. On app.wafrn.net (fedi/bluesky tumblr clone) they have no control.