NodeBB-ActivityPub Bridge Test Instance

Questions:

- What if we added something to HTTP where if you're only fetching a page to read OpenGraph tags, you send a special header saying "I only want the OpenGraph data", and the server then has the option of sending only the <meta> tags and nothing else?

- Could this help with the Mastodon "hug of death" (because the server can generate a simpler version of the page, caches can behave differently etc) where many instances rush to generate preview cards driving the previewed site offline?

@trwnh @erincandescent @ikuturso @jrose this raises an important question. Why the fuck are we not just using a pki to start with

@trwnh yes, that's why in my example I picked the first three letters of "kademlia"

@trwnh @erincandescent @ikuturso @jrose I am proposing inventing a did:kad, or a did:kad2 if did:kad is already being used, and giving it whatever properties would be needed to make it work the way I said.

And yes, I'm proposing creating an exact clone of plc that doesn't depend on plc.directory.

@erincandescent @ikuturso @trwnh @jrose I am proposing engineering a situation where did:plc:eepire and did:kad:eepire point to the same resource.

@trwnh @ikuturso @jrose if someone develops a better did method, surely you could just have two DIDs point to the same repo? Use Good DID with non-bluesky systems and Bad DID with bluesky systems. Maybe they could even have the same "key" (the Z in did:Y:Z)

@gbargoud Sure. You could do that. I'm aware of a patch to the PDS (backend) software that allows it to flat out publish via ActivityPub. I haven't seen a *frontend* that merges the streams yet though.

There's also the problem that you can't reeeallly monitor *just part* of the Bluesky network. To follow part of it you're supposed to drink the entire firehose and filter out the parts you care about.

And that's why I say, TLDR:

- I am legitimately excited about the work being done by Blacksky Algorithms! I am using their frontend and happy with it.

- Northsky is an interesting development to watch

- If you're on a Bluesky PDS, I recommend migrating off with one of these tools https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:ii5jchdzlmcojjw4dqczcgkh/post/3lyt6t6qfa22u

- Everything Sucks. A LOT of things would have to change at a social level for *any* entity other than Bluesky to have power or independence in the ATP ecosystem. I still don't trust Bluesky.

No. Because "Gertrude", in our hypothetical, *won't bother making those posts*. Because the vast, incredible, overwhelming majority of Bluesky users are still on the Bluesky network, and she is excommunicated. She *could* cultivate a group of followers who all use the Northsky infrastructure just so they can see her posts. But she could also cultivate a following on her Patreon. So Hypothetical Gertrude ignores Bluesky, posts to Patreon, and her Patreon posts get *shared* to Bluesky. (3/3)

I (me, mcc) never trusted Bluesky, so I've been self-hosting my own PDS from the start. I've been happily using blacksky.community for the last month (since Bluesky started gating access to their appview/web frontend on clicking to agree to a new TOS that seemed to me sketchy). Hypothetically, "Gertrude" could do the same. She can join Northsky PDS, make posts through Zeppelin, and Bluesky blocks her but Blacksky just fetches the posts from her PDS for me, and I get to read them.

Right? (2/3)

Imagine a hypothetical comic artist, "Gertrude". One day a hypothetical podcaster named "Louis CK" dies, and "Gertrude" posts something rude about this. Bluesky bans her. She's now deleted from the Bluesky PDS, blocked from the Bluesky relay and appview. Say, hypothetically, that virtually everyone agrees this was a bad moderation decision.

But Bluesky is decentralized, so we don't have to use the Bluesky PDS, relay, moderation service, or appview! We can Credibly Exit! Right? Right? (1/3)

I don't want to talk about C‍​harlie K‍​irk, so I won't. Skipping forward:

We're now seeing a "Northsky" copy of the ATP stack coming together which seeks to be a Blacksky equivalent for the 2SLGBTQIA+ community. This will probably be viable within the next couple weeks, unless it collapses in toxic queer-community infighting (which may already be beginning).

So. Three fullstack ATP instances soon. Is Bluesky "decentralized" now? Well, no, not really. Let me run through a Hypothetical Scenario.

And this is a problem because the Bluesky moderators are *having a time*. This leads us to impetus #2 for Bluesky decentralization: A huge faction on Bluesky is leftist shitposters and trans folks who fled Twitter early under looming threat of censorship by Elon Musk. Bluesky *does not* seem to want this group in their userbase and repeated "odd" moderation decisions have reduced trust in Bluesky among this user community to zero. The death of C‍​harlie K‍​irk has brought this to a breaking point.

Why does the "relay" matter? Well, because although Bluesky's claim is that moderation is "composable" in their system— that you can choose which moderators to follow— moderation decisions made by Bluesky are hard binding on systems they control. Someone blocked by Bluesky is blocked from the Bluesky appview, their content will get removed from the Bluesky PDS if they were using that. The Bluesky relay censors content that violates the data "schema"; I suspect (?) it enforces moderation also.

If you sign up with https://blacksky.community you get:

- Blacksky's "appview"/web frontend
- Optionally, Blacksky's PDS
- Blacksky's moderation layer (and you can optionally enable Bluesky's too)

Almost-complete independence! What I'm not clear on is to whether, or to what degree Blacksky relies on Bluesky's "relay":

What I saw happen when Black Twitter came to Fediverse is attempts to build community resources— like shared cross-instance blocklist infrastructure— get demonized by white queers as being anti-queer (because they, personally, wound up moderated— due to, as far as I saw, entirely real racism). I saw multiple projects shut down or hobbled by this and good people driven off fedi. I don't know if any devs from that era are involved in the new Bluesky efforts. But the Bluesky efforts *are* thriving.

The biggest movement on this front has come from the community formerly known as Black Twitter, which now has complete, viable alternative dupes of the whole stack:

Rudy wants revolution. (@rude1.blacksky.team)

blacksky.app → pds atproto.africa → relay blacksky.community → app @blackskyweb.xyz → moderation @tektite.cc → migration assembly.blacksky.community → governance blackskyweb.xyz → marketing website rsky.satnav.dev → exported data explorer https://blacksky.community

Blacksky Community (blacksky.community)

This makes intuitive sense to me! My first question, looking at ATP, is "why do free dev for this protocol, controlled by one corporation, when Fediverse is right there and is more complete?". But the black dev community, from everything I saw, tried to adopt Fediverse *first* and basically got harassed off.

I would like to give an update on "federation" on Bluesky.

My expectation was it was unlikely we'd ever see this happen because "federation" on ATProto means basically reproducing the entirety of the Bluesky software stack. In old Big Data terms, on ActivityPub your instance is a "horizontal shard" of the network; ATProto forces full DB replicas only.

Still, we're seeing movement on this front, which I'd split into two categories:

1. Your fault (you reading this)
2. Aaron Rodericks's fault