this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2024
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From what I understand, bsky's architecture seems to allow federation at multiple levels. On one side the individual profiles are actually websites and the app aggregates the content almost as an RSS reader. I do see some profiles which are independent like Jeff Gierling's, so yes federation at the profile level seems to work.
And this is really important because it is one way to prevent your data from being hostage by the service. Then there is another level of federation. I'm not entirely sure of the terminology here, but there is one aggregator aspect, which is quite compute intensive. And that one I don't know if there is another instance of it. But functionally speaking, I'm quite impressed by the technical aspect of bsky. There has been a lot of thought put into it.
And monetizing it is not the issue, the problem is mostly how. That they have some paid features is fine, it's even important that there are ways to monetize it without milking their users of their privacy.
Let's hope this works out and becomes sustainable while respecting the users!
The aggregator is called the Relay, and I haven't even found anything suggesting one could realistically selfhost it. Then you need to handle the massive stream of data coming through it with AppViews, which are tough to handle too (there are a few but not many iirc).
That said, I am also impressed with the thought behind ATProtocol. It seems much more robust and defined than ActivityPub.
That's probably because they built a protocol specifically for a usecase, rather than building a protocol and hoping that someone will come along with a usecase.
My understanding was that activitypub was basically a rough formalization of existing protocols, designed to be as flexible as possible. More a template than a real protocol. Unfortunately mastodon's popularity basically made a bunch of things de-facto obligatory but not well documented, and there's still a bunch of ways to do.. anything.