Discussion
Bluesky is down today. "Hah", I think, "since I use a self-hosted PDS for posting and Blacksky for viewing posts, I can go on using the service just fine".
Blacksky can't show me my own posts. I can make them and they show up on my PDS, but my profile shows none more recent than last night.
I wonder if Blacksky is coincidentally having server problems, or if Blacksky has a still-undisclosed dependency on Bluesky services. (It *does* have disclosed use of Bluesky moderation; maybe that's it.)
There's a bit in Terry Jones' "Starship Titanic" where an alien gets caught in a traffic jam on Earth, and explodes "your transportation system is so poorly designed! when more people use it, it goes *slower*! you should design it so it goes *faster*— to accommodate the extra load!".
It's funny because the former seems like the obvious, natural way transportation works, and the latter seems to require magic alien future technology.
P2P is a world where naturally the more people use it, the faster and more resilient the network becomes. Load gets distributed. Working nodes talk to each other and ignore nonworking nodes. That's how the primitive, BitTorrent era systems worked.
Bluesky somehow applied superfancy alien future technology to invent P2P traffic jams. When one node goes down, the others go down because they depended on it. Because it's a mesh of interoperating microservices by different providers, not federation.
@mcc I don't know anything about Bluesky architecture, but I love a well-crafted scathing witticism (like that bit about the microservices).
@areactis Although it's gratifying if you like my prose, it's not a witticism! It's just an actual description of Bluesky's approach. They documented the links between their microservices and let you substitute your own services that interact through the same system of JSON RPCS and websockets. This is how they intend you to use "ATProto"— it looks more like https://stream.place than Blacksky. They claim Blacksky (reimplementing ALL the services) was a goal but they DON'T make it easy…
This appears to be the explanation:
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:w4xbfzo7kqfes5zb7r6qv3rw/post/3mjmztqnuwc2g
In Bluesky, the PDS talks to the relay talks to the appview goes to the client. Blacksky set up all four last year. But they only deployed their PDS and client, at first. They used Bluesky's relay and appview. This wasn't clearly disclosed. Then there was a censorship scare, and they switched to their own appview. But apparently they're still using Bluesky's relay. This wasn't clearly disclosed. Now relay death kills Blacksky.
@mcc When I initially raised my eyebrows at Bluesky's notion of "federation", I was told that anyone can run a relay on a small cheap computer, it's dead easy, etc.…
Now, interestingly, this means that Blacksky users can continue talking to Blacksky users. I can read Rudy's posts on Blacksky. Because that bypasses the relay. But¹ to read my *own* posts, *on a self-hosted PDS*, Bluesky is apparently required, because Blacksky relies on Bluesky's "relay" to scrape my PDS before it gets added to the Blacksky appview database.
¹ (if I'm taking Rudy's posts correctly, hardly a guarantee)
And it's extremely relatable why Rudy took this shortcut of "build out our own stuff, but rely on Bluesky's components until we're forced to drop it": *Because standing up your own Bluesky stack is nightmarish!* It is a borderline miracle that a team his size made this work at all; I'm not sure a third team could replicate to the extent Blacksky has (and even on non-outage days, there are still large technical problems with Blacksky which cannot conveniently be fit in this thread).
Because this is the other "we used future alien technology to make it worse" thing about Bluesky.
In the "natural", Hobbesian form of P2P, the more nodes you add the less work per node you need to do, because of work sharing.
But Bluesky's "federation" is like blockchain. When you create a second "instance", that instance must duplicate *literally all the work* of the first instance. It must scrape all the posts itself. It must archive all the posts itself. It must CSAM-scan the posts itself.
This is why I believe Bluesky was never meant to be federated. To create a Bluesky "instance", like Blacksky is heroically attempting, you have to perfectly duplicate every server Bluesky runs. But Bluesky is a business operating at a loss by burning unlimited-for-now VC cash. That has always implied only a business with unlimited VC cash can create an instance. Blacksky is succeeding. Except on days where they aren't.
TLDR
1. My definition of "P2P" or "Federated" is that if server A goes down, servers B and C can still talk to each other.
2. Bluesky/"Atmosphere" fails at this because Blacksky (B) requires Bluesky (A) to talk to me (C).
3. In order for Blacksky to avert this, they have to do something unreasonable and expensive.
4. Blacksky someday *will* do this, but will depend heavily on massively overworking Rudy and a few other people. This may someday fail.
5. ActivityPub has problems, but not these
@mcc I thought with the bluesky model of federation, they *all* had dependencies on bluesky-central?
@miss_rodent Blacksky claims to have evaded that trap by duplicating literally every level of the Bluesky stack.
@mcc @miss_rodent my shallow understanding is that not only does the stack need to be fully duplicated for interoperability but there must also be a complex interconnection between the services in the stack.
All the relays need to consume and replicate the same firehouse of data
All the PDSes must accept "pull requests" from all the relays (I don't know enough about ATProto to know how the relays "register" with PDSes
All the appviews and labelers need to interact with all the relays and clients
...and so on. The ATmosphere is really kinda effed up, like they took Fediverse and put it through a pivot table to turn everything sideways. Each fedi instance implements the whole stack of serviced to manage just what is relevant to itself. ATmosphere is a composition composed of all these services that each must manage everything, everywhere, all at once, but with an open protocol.
So, the vision of atmosphere is instead of picking a "home server" you pick a "set of services"...
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