According to their blog post a few days ago, they’re looking at federation in H1 '24, and beginning the move to put governance of the AT Protocol that powers BlueSky to an established standards body like IEFT, though they predict that’ll be a multi-year process.[1]
I hope they continue to move towards federation; the developers at least appear very interested in it even if the community doesn’t, but I’m gonna be apprehensive about getting too excited until it actually happens.
They have a number of big promises with AT Protocol, including fully portable accounts that let you keep your content, even if your home-instance (what they call provider) goes down,[2] but it’s hard to see if this is even preferable while they’re still centralized.
Standards bodies is where social protocols traditionally go to die (see Jabber/XMPP).
Fully portable accounts, even fully portable communities, is something possible with Lemmy (not implemented), along with several other interesting possibilities.
How would fully portable accounts and communities be implemented do you think? My vague understanding is that users, communities and content lives at a particular URL and can’t simply change its domain.
Users — Mastodon deals with it by introducing a “Move” action that makes any followers switch from following the old user URL to a new user URL. A server export and import would be required for the user’s subscribed communities, config, and profile data.
Comments — This is where things get somewhat hairy, but possible; the new home server (instance) would need to re-publish the user’s content as coming from the new user URL. Ideally there could be a similar “Move” or “Takeover” activity that an instance could broadcast for each content item, so they would get reattached to the new user URL.
Interactions — Other user’s responses, boosts, faves, etc. reference old content URLs, so instances should follow the “Move” and “Takeover” events and fix those accordingly.
Lemmy Communities/Posts — This one’s actually the easiest: communities are just a special user that boosts any message sent to the community. You can clone a community right now by simply creating a “community user” and having it boost the same messages as the “source” community. Then you can delete the original, or have it de-boost stuff, or keep both boosts, or whatever.
Extras:
Cross-posting — A “community user” boosts a post from another (it’s a pity we don’t have this yet).
Splitting a Post — Have the second community user boost a post with just some of the comment threads, while the original de-boosts them. Now there are two posts with maybe comments that maybe follow different instance rules, or fit better with different instance profiles.
Post linking to a toot or comment — This would need some format change, but wouldn’t be too difficult.
Upgrading a comment to a post — This would require several of the previous features, but would allow moving off-topic conversations to their right place.
Bluesky already allows you to use your own domain for your handle. Currently they just use a TXT record in DNS to verify it is your domain - but adding another record to specify on which instance this is hosted shouldn’t be too hard.
Thanks! Seems interesting, especially to see what federation looks like with their more centralised model.
Personally I hope it goes well. 1. Because I think the Fedi could do with competition. 2. The idea of having relatively centralised services complementing the distributed network makes a lot of sense I suspect, with similar realisations percolating around the Fedi over time, and it might be fruitful to see it succeed instead of the usual Fedi snobbiness around not being a “real” federstion.
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According to their blog post a few days ago, they’re looking at federation in H1 '24, and beginning the move to put governance of the AT Protocol that powers BlueSky to an established standards body like IEFT, though they predict that’ll be a multi-year process.[1]
I hope they continue to move towards federation; the developers at least appear very interested in it even if the community doesn’t, but I’m gonna be apprehensive about getting too excited until it actually happens.
They have a number of big promises with AT Protocol, including fully portable accounts that let you keep your content, even if your home-instance (what they call provider) goes down,[2] but it’s hard to see if this is even preferable while they’re still centralized.
https://atproto.com/blog/2023-protocol-roadmap ↩︎
https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto-website/blob/516ce223e58b3a25bfa5150e00bb28533720885a/content/specs/atp.md ↩︎
Standards bodies is where social protocols traditionally go to die (see Jabber/XMPP).
Fully portable accounts, even fully portable communities, is something possible with Lemmy (not implemented), along with several other interesting possibilities.
How would fully portable accounts and communities be implemented do you think? My vague understanding is that users, communities and content lives at a particular URL and can’t simply change its domain.
Right now, there are several elements:
Extras:
Bluesky already allows you to use your own domain for your handle. Currently they just use a TXT record in DNS to verify it is your domain - but adding another record to specify on which instance this is hosted shouldn’t be too hard.
Thanks! Seems interesting, especially to see what federation looks like with their more centralised model.
Personally I hope it goes well. 1. Because I think the Fedi could do with competition. 2. The idea of having relatively centralised services complementing the distributed network makes a lot of sense I suspect, with similar realisations percolating around the Fedi over time, and it might be fruitful to see it succeed instead of the usual Fedi snobbiness around not being a “real” federstion.