Natanael

@Natanael@infosec.pub

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Angry, disappointed users react to Bluesky's upcoming blue check mark verification system⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  In fact, it is worse than the storage requirements, because the message delivery requirements become quadratic at the scale of full decentralization: to send a message to one user is to send a message to all. Rather than writing one letter, a copy of that letter must be made and delivered to every person on earth

  That’s written assuming the edge case of EVERYBODY running a full relay and appview, and that’s not per-node scaling cost but global scaling cost.

  Because they don’t scale like that, it’s geometric instead (for every full relay and appview, there’s one full copy with linear scaling to network activity).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Angry, disappointed users react to Bluesky's upcoming blue check mark verification system⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s literally no restrictions other than simple rate limiting, which you can ask for exceptions for.

  I don’t know a Mastodon/lemmy server which wouldn’t rate limit new peers

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Angry, disappointed users react to Bluesky's upcoming blue check mark verification system⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Partially - something running independent infrastructure like Whitewind (blogging on atproto) will still work just like before (it’s easier for them to run it independently because you don’t need a full network view, just pull in the posts from the user’s PDS for standalone display)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Angry, disappointed users react to Bluesky's upcoming blue check mark verification system⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  No, it doesn’t scale “quadratically”. That’s what going viral on Mastodon does to a small instance, not on bluesky. Pretty much everything scales linearly. The difference is certain components handle a larger fraction of the work (appview and relay).

  Both a bluesky appview and a Mastodon instance scales by the size of the userbase which it interacts with. Mastodon likes to imagine that the userbase will always be consistent, but it isn’t. Anything viewed by a large part of the whole Mastodon network forces the host to serve the entirety of the network and all its interactions. So does a bluesky appview, in just the same way, but they acknowledge this upfront.

  Meanwhile, you CAN host a bluesky PDS account host and have your traffic scale only by the rate of your users’ activity + number of relays you push these updates to. Going viral doesn’t kill your bandwidth.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Angry, disappointed users react to Bluesky's upcoming blue check mark verification system⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  No, PDS federation is fully open now.

  They’re also actively supporting development of 3rd party appviews and relays.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Angry, disappointed users react to Bluesky's upcoming blue check mark verification system⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Maybe you remember PDS federation not being open for a while, but it’s open now.

  Running a public appview can be very expensive, but they’re working on making it cheaper to run one with a limited scope.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Angry, disappointed users react to Bluesky's upcoming blue check mark verification system⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  They never said they’d do so natively with other protocols - but they support Bridgy, so you already can do that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Angry, disappointed users react to Bluesky's upcoming blue check mark verification system⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Domains only help you verify organizations and individuals you recognize directly.

  This verification system also allows 3rd parties (it’s NOT just bluesky themselves!) to issue attestations that s given account belongs to who they say they are, which would help people like independent journalists, etc.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Unlike in movies, most smart people aren't good in chess.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I play Pokémon Unite a lot. Very wide variation in abilities and skillsets

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bluesky has started honoring takedown requests from Turkish government⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not sure you know what content addressing is.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bluesky has started honoring takedown requests from Turkish government⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Go away.

  Even I2P uses supernodes, that doesn’t make it centralized because you don’t depend on them.

  You don’t need ultra purist single-type-node mesh like scuttlebutt to be decentralized.

  Bluesky is federated, where the federation has multiple layers and EVERY layer can be run independently and interconnected to other nodes.

  Beyond that, you still have not addressed that you said a blatantly self contradicting statement; that people self host relays, but also they don’t self host relays because that is costly and the self hosted relay code available to the public is experimental and mainly used for reasons tangential to the core function of a production ready relay.

  Your inability to read remains YOUR problem, not mine.

  My point is exactly this - it’s feasible to maintain your own private relay by mirroring the content you want, imitating both Mastodon and scuttlebutt.

  You can choose to share a community relay - or not.

  Running it for an audience of yourself is reasonably cheap. Running it for a worldwide audience is where bandwidth gets expensive. That’s why people run private ones.

  Not capable of synchronizing with the original? Lmao. It’s literally content addressed, you can synchronize with every relay separately, swap arbitrarily between public appviews, regardless of who runs what and where it gets data from. It’s maximally capable of synchronization. It even beats nostr and scuttlebutt because you can VERIFY you have fresh and complete data (Merkle trees yay).

  Pretty sure Whitewind pulls in data themselves directly when users use self hosted atproto accounts, maintaining its own relay index. Don’t think they make it publicly accessible though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bluesky has started honoring takedown requests from Turkish government⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Sorry what, an example of a 3rd party service proving 3rd party mirrors exists proves it’s vulnerable to what? It’s content addressed and as open as it gets, it’s literally designed to survive if the company goes down

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Unlike in movies, most smart people aren't good in chess.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Almost anything where memorization is the primary skill is going to be dominated by people with specific interest, rather than general high intelligence (certainly doesn’t exclude it, but it’s just statistics). Gotta look for something frequently requiring novel problem solving and adaption to filter for high probability of high general intelligence.

  Then there’s also a lot of games requiring very narrow intellectual ability. Being able to parse a specific ruleset, or doing a specific kind of math fast, without needing to be able to handle anything novel. You’ll certainly find some “interesting individuals” around those kinds of games.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ok, thanks...⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Generation why is the world like this

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bluesky has started honoring takedown requests from Turkish government⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Not knowing what a relay does and going on the attack over it makes you the fanatic.

  It’s an archive node, which can (but doesn’t have to) forward ingested data

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bluesky has started honoring takedown requests from Turkish government⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Choosing to not understand the architecture is your failure, not mine

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bluesky has started honoring takedown requests from Turkish government⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  But that IS the point. The possibility of running independently PLUS the ability of bluesky users to migrate their account wholesale away from bluesky servers to 3rd party servers means you’re not dependent on them.

  They’re literally designing for the principle of “the company is a future adversary” (see: Twitter, et al).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bluesky has started honoring takedown requests from Turkish government⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Currently, you have stuff like Clearsky (it’s basically an archive.org for bluesky)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bluesky has started honoring takedown requests from Turkish government⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yup

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bluesky has started honoring takedown requests from Turkish government⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s always been possible with the use of content addressing, it’s just that they’ve been spending most time building out core services and are now focusing on making it cheaper to run.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bluesky has started honoring takedown requests from Turkish government⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bluesky has started honoring takedown requests from Turkish government⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s just if you want a complete copy. You can choose to store only parts of it, and retrieve what’s missing from other relay servers when you need it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bluesky has started honoring takedown requests from Turkish government⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  They’re planning on migrating to the new MLS group messaging encryption standard, which is built to support federated messaging encryption (more efficient than the current Matrix protocol)

  (also, Matrix are also planning on adopting it, and the RCS spec is getting it too)

  It’s long to take a while though. The standard is very recent and nobody has a complete implementation yet.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bluesky has started honoring takedown requests from Turkish government⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Those specs can be handled by a medium range laptop

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bluesky has started honoring takedown requests from Turkish government⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Content addressing

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bluesky has started honoring takedown requests from Turkish government⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  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)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bluesky has started honoring takedown requests from Turkish government⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The fix they’re trying to implement is to make it cheaper to run relays and appviews, allowing you to run them with only partial network data, prioritizing your own social network first

  By the way, those relay storage costs include indexes and not just raw data

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bluesky has started honoring takedown requests from Turkish government⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Jack Dorsey only provided funding to bluesky while the old plan to make Twitter run on an open protocol was still in place (ironically he wanted to avoid responsibility for moderation by doing that).

  He then left Bluesky completely, and never had any major influence after the initial funding.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bluesky has started honoring takedown requests from Turkish government⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The content is still accessible, just not via the official Bluesky servers from that region, with content addressing and signatures you can even be certain that mirror sites haven’t modified any content.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Appers⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  because the right have redefined racism to be “prejudice+ill intent”,

  They claim to define it that way, and then immediate after accused everybody else of racism just arguing in good faith when you’re pointing out THEIR malice against minorities. “You weren’t supposed to notice my victim’s ethnicity is different, that means you see race and thus YOU’RE racist” is the logic you can expect.