Original post: https://bsky.app/profile/ssg.dev/post/3lmuz3nr62k26
Email from Bluesky in the screenshot:
Hi there,
We are writing to inform you that we have received a formal request from a legal authority in Turkey regarding the removal of your account associated with the following handle (@carekavga.bsky.social) on Bluesky.
The legal authority has claimed that this content violates local laws in Turkey. As a result, we are required to review the request in accordance with local regulations and Bluesky’s policies.
Following a thorough review, we have determined that the content in question violates local laws in Turkey, as outlined in the legal request. In compliance with these legal provisions, we have restricted access to your account for users.
So the decentralized version makes sense to me. The blue sky model you describe sounds like just farming out the server load. What am I missing?
That is literally how I read it as well, BlueSky is farming out server load to enthusiastic and dedicated users, while also just going ham on the PR / propoganda / marketing making themselves appear to be something they are not.
Unless I missed something and BlueSky is actually letting people run and custom configure their own relays at least semi independently… yeah, they’re basically being quite shady and misleading.
For relays yes, but for PDS that’s not at all true. The PDS architecture lets you own your data and migrate it away from Bluesky servers or even from the BS apps, when/if they will be available. Something that ActivityPub severely lacks. Try to migrate your account from one Lemmy instance to another.
Yes, you can host your own PDS server, that is known and stated.
The entire design of a lemmy instance is meant to be more ‘self contained’, as I already mentioned. This is what enables the federation network to organize in a ‘many to many’ connection style, as opposed to a ‘many to one’.
A lemmy instance roughly has many/most of the capabilities of a PDS, Relay, and AppView… all rolled into one.
This is a fundamental difference of a ‘true’ federation model… all the members of the federation are capable of operating independently.
If you are in a federation of unequals, with built in dependencies… your ‘federation’ is much more like a king with vassal states, not a voluntary association.
Yes, migration of a user account from one instance to another would be complicated… but … so would migrating a user from one PDS to another.
I don’t even know how you could fully ‘migrate away from BlueSky servers’… when BlueSky run the only Relays.
Also, many (most?) actual client apps for viewing lemmy, posting on it, etc… they pretty much hold a lot of your particular user customizations, at least as it comes to visual theming, independently, locally, not even related to the actual user account on an instance you are using.
They also support easy switching between different lemmy user/instance accounts…
…
Also also, as far as I am aware… if you have an account on a lemmy instance, you can delete your account and this will wipe out all of that account’s posts and comments across the whole fediverse, aside from modlogs and internet archive web snapshotting type stuff.
I … think you can also export your own data as well?
Not 100% sure on these last two parts, maybe an instance admin or powermod could chime in… but I think this is correct?
People are allowed to run their own relays, but it’s really expensive and nobody wants to.
Really?
Like, this is genuine news to me, if its true.
https://github.com/itaru2622/bluesky-selfhost-env
I can find tools like this, that help you set up a good number of elements of BlueSky… but the only mention of the relay (apparently also known as BGS, for… BigSky?)… is that you connect to it… not run your own.
Beyond even the price point and required server hosting heft… where, where is an actual ‘here is how to download, configure and run your own BlueSky relay’?
As far as I am aware, all there has been is a mix of vague, noncommital, and hopeful musings of various people suggesting that one day maybe it will be possible to do this, hopefully they’ll support that soon…
… which to me at least, very much reminds me of fanboys/girls of a video game just coping with the fact that their favorite video game with a massive bug or lacking a major advertised feature… will just have it fixed one day… even though the devs have been radio silent about it for a year.
That there are actually multiple relays. There’s no hard coded single relay, that would be ridiculous and idk why people keep repeating it
There is a hard coded relay in the official bluesky app, just like it has a hard coded moderation service. But both of those are changeable with third party appviews/clients
I was oversimplifying a bit such that it wouldn’t be overwhelming to a self-described uninformed person asking for an explanation.
Yes, there are multiple actual relays but they functionally constitute a single layer or class of components in a birds eye view of the whole system.
As far as I am aware, no one other than BlueSky runs the relays, or has the code to do so.
If I am wrong about that, I would appreciate a source indicating such.
Does anyone other than BlueSky actually run a relay?
Several people have self hosted relays. Afaik nothing that anyone has used in “production”, everyone just uses the default one. I expect that will change as people figure it out, and trust in bsky pbc drops with things like the current Turkish censorship incident
Example of self hosting https://bsky.app/profile/why.bsky.team/post/3lkwg2djrfk23
The code to run a relay is here https://github.com/bluesky-social/indigo
Your “example of self hosting” is not an example of self hosting the relay, just an appview which is still being fully dependent of other Bluesky services like the relay. It’s pretty unlikely that the relay would be at all practical to host on a RPi5. But even if it was the problem still remains that the network is set up in a way where self-hosting it only results in you creating your own separate bubble, not meaningfully participating in the official one.
I also doubt anyone has selfhosted relays long-term since right now there’s very little purpose to that and the resource requirements are massive as well as keep growing at a fast pace in terms of the disk space required.
The whole architecture is built around content addressing and allowing every account hosting server (PDS) talk to multiple relays and to allowing mirroring.
The whole point is to NOT create bubbles.
People already run their own PDS servers and participate with the official bluesky network, and can talk to users there, because their self hosted PDS syncs to the bluesky relay.
If you run your own relay and appview it STILL works, and you can talk without bubbles, if you still link your PDS to the bluesky relay to make yourself visible to their users, and if you set your appview / relay to retrieve content from the bluesky relay then you see content from bluesky users too.
Self hosted relays do exist, they’re just not open to the public (mostly used for archival / development currently)
PDS is not very significant, it’s just a tiny piece of the puzzle and doesn’t really prove anything about the architecture. See this for more on what I’m getting at: https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/113365406995624763
That post is very misguided.
First of all, he’s saying “you SHOULD make your PDS invisible to the bluesky servers because otherwise what’s the point”, but that’s exactly equivalent to saying “our community want it’s own Mastodon server - that means we MUST defederate Mastodon.social or what’s the point?”
That’s nonsense. Don’t enforce silos on people.
Also, which relays to support are not chosen by users, it’s chosen by the services the users choose. The PDS choose which relays to sync to, the appview does too, just like feed generators and moderation labelers does.
Also moderation labelers can be shared.
Hosting a PDS is very cheap, it’s just storage and bandwidth for the posts multiplied by the number of relays you directly sync to. With a few users on each that’s nothing. It’s in the range of free tier VPS hosting, RPi grade.
Deduplicating is probably the most trivial part. There’s already code for handling duplicate events in streams. But more practically speaking, there’s algorithms like set reconciliation which can make it significantly more bandwidth efficient to subscribe to multiple relays even when they have overlapping content.
Can you explain what do you think “backfill” means in the context of the linked post?
Sorry if that sounds disrespectful but we kinda need to have shared definitions for stuff
I have zero need to play games with you. Make your case if you have one.