No joke, this PR adds preliminary ActivityPub (i.e. Mastodon) support to the PDS. 🤯
IMPORTANT: You shouldn't expect full interoperability with this alone! At most, you should expect that your p...
Hmm, let’s see if I remember the terminology correctly:
Client apps have nothing to do with it, obviously.
Alternate appviews have nothing to do with it, except in that they’d presumably need to work with whatever form of atproto federation exists, if any did.
Alternate relays aren’t federated unless there’s some protocol for routing messages between them — such as ActivityPub.
because hosting a full-network relay is super cheap, including bandwidth. there are multiple people who are running full-network relays (monitoring and relaying everything from every PDS) for less than 30USD per month
Well that’s an interesting development, which people seem to have begun experimenting with in the past few weeks. Of course for the time being I suppose it’s made somewhat easier for the relays by 99% of the users being hosted on the small collection of official bsky.network PDS servers.
Some more discussion of it in which there may be hints as to how atproto people might slowly progress towards reinventing some of the things we take for granted on the fediverse.
i think the main takeaway is that the fediverse has hugely overindexed on relays being this big huge centralising force in the atproto network. And thats simply not true at all. The flipside of that is that relays also dont really matter much either. All they do is simply aggregating from a distributed network of data storage into a single firehose. Its really cool that you can do that for super cheap. but its also just a small part of the entire network architecture. like, atproto relays are not CDNs, for example, and video CDNs are expensive to run.
If they don’t crawl the entire network then most of the network cannot contact them at all? Which makes it … not really a network. That’s where federation would come in.
It does federate though, federation is multiple nodes in a network cooperating, which they do.
HTTP is a network even though it doesn’t (usually) federate.
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Hmm, let’s see if I remember the terminology correctly:
Client apps have nothing to do with it, obviously.
Alternate appviews have nothing to do with it, except in that they’d presumably need to work with whatever form of atproto federation exists, if any did.
Alternate relays aren’t federated unless there’s some protocol for routing messages between them — such as ActivityPub.
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Let me just ask the less technical and more important questions:
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Right… it did take me a minute to remember how the relays work. Well, when there are a few hundred of them we’ll see how it goes.
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Really? I thought there were only two. How are the small ones able to afford the bandwidth to monitor everything from every PDS?
because hosting a full-network relay is super cheap, including bandwidth. there are multiple people who are running full-network relays (monitoring and relaying everything from every PDS) for less than 30USD per month
https://fediversereport.com/atmosphere-report-116/
Well that’s an interesting development, which people seem to have begun experimenting with in the past few weeks. Of course for the time being I suppose it’s made somewhat easier for the relays by 99% of the users being hosted on the small collection of official bsky.network PDS servers.
Some more discussion of it in which there may be hints as to how atproto people might slowly progress towards reinventing some of the things we take for granted on the fediverse.
This news probably deserve its own post
i think the main takeaway is that the fediverse has hugely overindexed on relays being this big huge centralising force in the atproto network. And thats simply not true at all. The flipside of that is that relays also dont really matter much either. All they do is simply aggregating from a distributed network of data storage into a single firehose. Its really cool that you can do that for super cheap. but its also just a small part of the entire network architecture. like, atproto relays are not CDNs, for example, and video CDNs are expensive to run.
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If they don’t crawl the entire network then most of the network cannot contact them at all? Which makes it … not really a network. That’s where federation would come in.
It does federate though, federation is multiple nodes in a network cooperating, which they do.
HTTP is a network even though it doesn’t (usually) federate.