Unfortunately, Bluesky is unavailable in Mississippi right now, due to a new state law that requires age verification for all users.
While intended for child safety, we think this law poses broader challenges & creates significant barriers that limit free speech & harm smaller platforms like ours.
They’re right that the age verification shenanigans are bollocks though.
No. Atproto is decentralized. Bluesky is one application running on that protocol. Obviously they have the ability (and unfortunately the responsibility) to enforce the new law for traffic coming to them from that jurisdiction. Or ignore the (bad) law and block the traffic.
If you ran an atproto application you could allow or block the traffic however you wanted.
A firehose is a real time stream of events from a platform like Bluesky, all the posts and likes and follows etc. You can’t get older data that way, just new events as they happen.
Bluesky hosts the only official firehose but since the data is open another org could host it too if they wanted to pay for and maintain it.
Free Our Feeds is raising money to build more applications and duplicate more parts of the Bluesky architecture from a noncommercial entity so that Bluesky isn’t the only party in charge of it.
Thanks for your effort! I genuinely appreciate it!
Maybe I misunderstand, but what I gather from your writing, is that bluesky might become decentralized in the future, if a decent amount of separate groups manage to raise 30 million dollars each.
Parts of Bluesky are already decentralized, from an architectural point of view. But when you go to https://bsky.app/ one company is in control of that access point. The fundraising effort is more about redundancy than decentralization. If they had enough money they could mirror the whole network so they could have different rules, like for example not blocking Mississippi.
I believe the decentralization is already in place, it just takes money to implement it at Bluesky’s scale.
Ok, let’s say I create the 2nd firehose in existance, could you elaborate on how I would get everyone to read and write to it? Would I have to merge the bluesky firehose to mine, or have I effectively split the network until someone creates a third firehose that merges both? What if bluesky doesn’t care about my firehose, how will their users ever see my posts?
Please rest assured I ask out of genuine curiosity, I don’t expect you to have all the answers. But I might as well try my luck as you seem knowledgeable.
The firehose is a read only thing, there’s no writing to it. I guess to create a second one you would read from the official one and rebroadcast it? I don’t know exactly how it would work, I don’t know too many details about it.
No. Atproto is decentralized. Bluesky is one application running on that protocol. Obviously they have the ability (and unfortunately the responsibility) to enforce the new law for traffic coming to them from that jurisdiction. Or ignore the (bad) law and block the traffic.
If you ran an atproto application you could allow or block the traffic however you wanted.
What do I need to run an atproto application?
This is probably the best tutorial: https://atproto.com/guides/applications
Thanks! In the tutorial, they mention listening to the firehose. I’m not able to wrap my head around this (singular) firehose. But I remember seeing this initiative trying to crowdsource 30 million dollars to run one for 3 years Can you elaborate on that and help me understand better?
Edit: typos
A firehose is a real time stream of events from a platform like Bluesky, all the posts and likes and follows etc. You can’t get older data that way, just new events as they happen.
Bluesky hosts the only official firehose but since the data is open another org could host it too if they wanted to pay for and maintain it.
Here’s one visualization if the firehose: https://firesky.tv/
Free Our Feeds is raising money to build more applications and duplicate more parts of the Bluesky architecture from a noncommercial entity so that Bluesky isn’t the only party in charge of it.
Thanks for your effort! I genuinely appreciate it!
Maybe I misunderstand, but what I gather from your writing, is that bluesky might become decentralized in the future, if a decent amount of separate groups manage to raise 30 million dollars each.
Parts of Bluesky are already decentralized, from an architectural point of view. But when you go to https://bsky.app/ one company is in control of that access point. The fundraising effort is more about redundancy than decentralization. If they had enough money they could mirror the whole network so they could have different rules, like for example not blocking Mississippi.
I believe the decentralization is already in place, it just takes money to implement it at Bluesky’s scale.
Ok, let’s say I create the 2nd firehose in existance, could you elaborate on how I would get everyone to read and write to it? Would I have to merge the bluesky firehose to mine, or have I effectively split the network until someone creates a third firehose that merges both? What if bluesky doesn’t care about my firehose, how will their users ever see my posts?
Please rest assured I ask out of genuine curiosity, I don’t expect you to have all the answers. But I might as well try my luck as you seem knowledgeable.
Thanks!
edit: typos
The firehose is a read only thing, there’s no writing to it. I guess to create a second one you would read from the official one and rebroadcast it? I don’t know exactly how it would work, I don’t know too many details about it.