[nspattak]

half the comments so far talk about bluesky being similar to x ie private companies.

However AFAIK the use of the "AT protocol" seems to me to be a major difference https://bsky.social/about/faq.

I am really curious to know how I am wrong in that.

As a long time X user and now on bluesky i can tell that there is a huge difference in the content which makes it clear that the platform was pushing accounts with specific political views (or muting others)

[taraparo]

Doesn't mean anything. Facebook used to support XMPP.

[nspattak]

Supporting is on thing, being build on top of it is another thing. And on top of that, AFAIK on bluesky there is no "algorithm"

[agumonkey]

shallow knowledge on my side, but it seems that the AT proto requires some fancy relay node that, as of now, are only hosted by big corps, so no one has a a fully independent bsky instance

[Pufferbo]

This seems to be left out of the conversation when comparing Bluesky with the wider fediverse. The AT protocol relies on a bespoke setup and is complicated to implement. ActivityPub is comparatively simple, and can be implemented on pretty every thing with just a few endpoints.

[haileyok]

There is not a bespoke setup that you need to implement atproto. In fact, there are already a variety of applications making use of it (some to a higher degree than others). There are community implementations of app views, relays, PLC directories, and PDSes already in the wild, and - although I admittedly have a biased ear on the conversation - developers tend to appreciate the _lack_ of complication when implementing things.

[donohoe]

If ActivityPub is “simple” then that’s a recent’ish development. It used to be a mess.

I would imagine AT gets easier to use/setup given time too.

[synthetic-echo]

They said comparatively simple. As in, simple compared to AT

[zimpenfish]

You can do a basic[0] AP server in a single small (64k) PHP file[1].

[0] Single user, admittedly, but if we're talking about protocol simplicity, that's the nub.

[1] https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/02/activitypub-server-in-a-sin...

[half-kh-hacker]

you can run a resequencing relay good enough to feed an atproto appview pretty cheaply - it just needs to subscribe to a few thousand websocket endpoints to get a live tail of the whole network (incoming traffic is well under 50Mbps at peak in my experience)

running an archival mirroring relay is storage-intensive (on the order of tens of TB iirc?) but only serves as an optimization (you can backfill full atproto repositories straight from the relay instead of needing to reach out to the relevant data server)

[jovial_cavalier]

You cannot run a bluesky instance on your own. The AT protocol isn't really a protocol in the same way that matrix or mastodon is. It's just an API, you know like all platforms used to have?

[pfraze]

None of that is true

[jovial_cavalier]

Please point me to instructions on how to make my own bluesky instance that federates with the existing bluesky, and which does not rely on bluesky's authentication.

[psionides]

https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds?tab=readme-ov-file#sel...

[upofadown]

Just creating a protocol specification does not create a standard. You need politics for that...

[apichat]

Can you prove to us that it is possible to interact with someone on Bluesky without being registered on Bluesky?

Threads use e ActivityPub but we know it's bullshit and that they will shut down the network as soon as possible. Bluesky is the same shit. AT protocol is just a honey pot.

[LelouBil]

I did not use Bluesky a lot, and just set it up to try self-hosting.

From what I know :

- Right now you can self-host your PDS (Personal Data Server) that hosts your user account basically, and all of your user content (posts, images, etc...)

- The easiest way to register is to use bluesky's frontend, and specifying your PDS address, I didn't try to self-host it too but I would assume if you self-host the bluesky web app, or just do the api calls to your PDS by hand or in another application, registration would work too.

- From what I understood, when you post, it is completely stored on your PDS, and then there are kinds of "mega nodes", (I think they are called Firehoses ?) That aggregate from a bunch of PDS, (and the official bsky.social PDS) and present it to end users. I don't think you can self-host theses just yet.

So, in the end, I think you can absolutely interact on Bluesky without being registered, by installing your own PDS and only making calls to create an account on it and post on it, without having an account elsewhere. However, the "end user" part is still closed off for now, since the Blue Sky Frontend uses *official* aggregators that could theoretically refuse your posts.

Go here for more information:

https://atproto.com/

https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/atproto

https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/firehose

[noname120]

Won't your content be deprioritized if you do that though? Or won't it be further down the road? I fail to see any reason for Bluesky to be honest once the user base is big enough and people are silo'ed into it.

[haileyok]

My account is hosted on my own PDS that I run on my own. My public repo can be viewed here https://pdsls.dev/at/did:plc:oisofpd7lj26yvgiivf3lxsi, and you can see the requests being made directly to that PDS. The account is also viewable of course on the Bluesky app, https://bsky.app/profile/hailey.at.

[LtWorf]

They all start neutral.

[s_dev]

They don't e.g. Parler and Gab

[navigate8310]

AT Proto is heavily developed by BS and BS is itself the major consumer of AT Proto.