It should be pretty obvious that a decentralized network that many use specifically to not be connected to centralized networks houses mostly people who do not wish to have their posts bridged to B...
Should Mastodon-compatible clients have posts private-by-default on the UI?
This argument against bridges is beyond stupid. If you are posting on a public network, it’s more than reasonable to work with the expectation that your content will be visible outside of original channel.
How does it work exactly? From a quick look at the docs, it sounds like everything through the bridge would appear as coming from @web.brid.gy. Is that right? If so, that kind of mucks up the standard behavior of Lemmy. Lemmy allows both users and admins to block entire instances, so aggregating instances into one “mega-instance” effectively breaks that functionality. That’s not good from a UX perspective.
I tried searching for some bridges instances but didn’t have any luck. I guess I’m doing it wrong. Does anyone have a real example of something that works?
it sounds like everything through the bridge would appear as coming from @web.brid.gy.
Because this is the only current deployment of the bridge. The code is open source, if you want to host/run/manage your own bridge, you can do it.
That was the same issue that I had with fediverser and alien.top. Everyone got so obsessed with the bots from alien.top and caused so much drama that no admin would be interested in using it for the “login with reddit” functionality. If there was a few more other instances running the software, it would have been incredibly more helpful to get people to move away from Reddit while helping bootstrap the niche communities here (which are until today completely lacking in content and not attractive at all for the masses).
Doesn’t that mean we’d have a proliferation of duplicate content, if multiple bridges connect to the same external services?
I love this idea in theory, but I don’t think it makes sense in the context of Lemmy. Maybe it makes more sense in Mastodon? Or maybe I just misunderstand something.
Lemmy used to use whitelist based federation for a while. I don’t think it would’ve taken off if it wasn’t to the switch to blacklist based federation.
There are some annoying issues with bridges like these; for example, you can still find ten or twenty copies of outdated profiles for every major Twitter user out there now that Twitter shut down most bridge bots.
On the other hand, I don’t really get the anger this is causing. People are upset that the Fediverse is federating. They also assert that Bluesky doesn’t federate (it currently doesn’t, but the protocol is designed for federation!) when it’s clear that it now does.
Most Fediverse solutions have blocking options for bridges like these. I don’t know if there are servers that can block bots outright, but it’s certainly a possibility. These bridges are the Fediverse working as intended, and people pondering on the consequences should probably move to a server with limited federation options.
They also assert that Bluesky doesn’t federate (it currently doesn’t, but the protocol is designed for federation!) when it’s clear that it now does.
I’m not surprised about the skepticism there though. These are just promises, and we all know that a for-profit entity will happily sacrifice any promies if it means they make more money that way. Also depending on how exactly that federation will work it might be practically useless as well.
Scepticism is welcome, especially for companies founded by billionaires, but I don’t think it’s necessary to assume that federation will be killed off. They started out with no federation at all, then moved on to federating with the sandbox, and I’m quite certain they’ll open up real federation in time. There’s surprisingly little development power behind Bluesky, though, and its recent surge in popularity will no doubt have slowed down nice-to-haves like federation.
The AT Protocol is designed very differently from ActivityPub, making it quite difficult to federate and join the network as a small player, unless you’re only providing content. Following users requires a significantly more beefy server than you would on ActivityPub. On the other hand, ATProto solves a lot of problems Mastodon has (no two servers showing the same list of replies, for one). This leads to a situation where feeding content (and thus producing value) becomes attractive, but consuming content (and thus taking eyes away from the main server) becomes more of a challenge, presumably one left to either bridges like these, based around ActivityPub-based servers like Mastodon.
I think it’s very difficult for a company to take Bluesky’s network, set up their own server, and out-compete them. There’s only one category of company that I would expect to be capable of this, and that’s “billionaires looking to revolutionise things”, which is exactly what Bluesky is all about. It’s possible that Threads will try to integrate with Bluesky, but I don’t think that would take away anything from BS. In fact, I think it would only drive up BlueSky’s value to see Facebook invest in another company’s technology like that.
All of the above makes me quite confident that the Bluesky team will be able to deliver on their promises, in time. They’re not federation-first, and I don’t think they ever claimed to be, but that doesn’t make them anti-federation per se. I do have my doubts about some of the weird cryptocurrency/web3 stuff sprinkled into the protocol, but for now none of that seems to play a central role.
Should federation between servers be opt-in?
Should Mastodon-compatible clients have posts private-by-default on the UI?
This argument against bridges is beyond stupid. If you are posting on a public network, it’s more than reasonable to work with the expectation that your content will be visible outside of original channel.
How does it work exactly? From a quick look at the docs, it sounds like everything through the bridge would appear as coming from @web.brid.gy. Is that right? If so, that kind of mucks up the standard behavior of Lemmy. Lemmy allows both users and admins to block entire instances, so aggregating instances into one “mega-instance” effectively breaks that functionality. That’s not good from a UX perspective.
I tried searching for some bridges instances but didn’t have any luck. I guess I’m doing it wrong. Does anyone have a real example of something that works?
Because this is the only current deployment of the bridge. The code is open source, if you want to host/run/manage your own bridge, you can do it.
That was the same issue that I had with fediverser and alien.top. Everyone got so obsessed with the bots from alien.top and caused so much drama that no admin would be interested in using it for the “login with reddit” functionality. If there was a few more other instances running the software, it would have been incredibly more helpful to get people to move away from Reddit while helping bootstrap the niche communities here (which are until today completely lacking in content and not attractive at all for the masses).
Doesn’t that mean we’d have a proliferation of duplicate content, if multiple bridges connect to the same external services?
I love this idea in theory, but I don’t think it makes sense in the context of Lemmy. Maybe it makes more sense in Mastodon? Or maybe I just misunderstand something.
Lemmy used to use whitelist based federation for a while. I don’t think it would’ve taken off if it wasn’t to the switch to blacklist based federation.
There are some annoying issues with bridges like these; for example, you can still find ten or twenty copies of outdated profiles for every major Twitter user out there now that Twitter shut down most bridge bots.
On the other hand, I don’t really get the anger this is causing. People are upset that the Fediverse is federating. They also assert that Bluesky doesn’t federate (it currently doesn’t, but the protocol is designed for federation!) when it’s clear that it now does.
Most Fediverse solutions have blocking options for bridges like these. I don’t know if there are servers that can block bots outright, but it’s certainly a possibility. These bridges are the Fediverse working as intended, and people pondering on the consequences should probably move to a server with limited federation options.
I’m not surprised about the skepticism there though. These are just promises, and we all know that a for-profit entity will happily sacrifice any promies if it means they make more money that way. Also depending on how exactly that federation will work it might be practically useless as well.
Scepticism is welcome, especially for companies founded by billionaires, but I don’t think it’s necessary to assume that federation will be killed off. They started out with no federation at all, then moved on to federating with the sandbox, and I’m quite certain they’ll open up real federation in time. There’s surprisingly little development power behind Bluesky, though, and its recent surge in popularity will no doubt have slowed down nice-to-haves like federation.
The AT Protocol is designed very differently from ActivityPub, making it quite difficult to federate and join the network as a small player, unless you’re only providing content. Following users requires a significantly more beefy server than you would on ActivityPub. On the other hand, ATProto solves a lot of problems Mastodon has (no two servers showing the same list of replies, for one). This leads to a situation where feeding content (and thus producing value) becomes attractive, but consuming content (and thus taking eyes away from the main server) becomes more of a challenge, presumably one left to either bridges like these, based around ActivityPub-based servers like Mastodon.
I think it’s very difficult for a company to take Bluesky’s network, set up their own server, and out-compete them. There’s only one category of company that I would expect to be capable of this, and that’s “billionaires looking to revolutionise things”, which is exactly what Bluesky is all about. It’s possible that Threads will try to integrate with Bluesky, but I don’t think that would take away anything from BS. In fact, I think it would only drive up BlueSky’s value to see Facebook invest in another company’s technology like that.
All of the above makes me quite confident that the Bluesky team will be able to deliver on their promises, in time. They’re not federation-first, and I don’t think they ever claimed to be, but that doesn’t make them anti-federation per se. I do have my doubts about some of the weird cryptocurrency/web3 stuff sprinkled into the protocol, but for now none of that seems to play a central role.