Been getting this sense lately that the fediverse may be thinning out a bit, and in parallel getting a sense people I know are finally jumping to "bluesky" in numbers.

Trying to figure out exactly at what point I decide I'm willing to create a feed over there. My position has been "I'll post there when I don't have to use their servers to do it", but I continue to suspect this will literally never happen because their protocol is designed to look like federation without being ever federatable

Based on my (admittedly based on reading summaries of the whitepapers and not the whitepapers) understanding of the proposed bsky protocol, I think if I want to post in a way bsky users can see without using the services of BlueSky LLC the best I'll ever be able to do is post a write-only feed on my website which BlueSky LLC then crawls. But I wonder if I'll be able to opt into this kind of parasitic federation without agreeing to a TOS that gives BlueSky LLC rights to train an LLM on me

Imagine an alternate network shape for ATProto where instead of BlueSky's "Big Aggregator" relay, users associate their identifies with specific "home" relays, and relays only fetch posts from relays their "home" users follow "home" users on. This could enable non-algorithmic moderation by treating relay membership as "trust" and severing relays who don't internally moderate. Hey wait, we just reinvented ActivityPub without domain names!

You know what I want? ActivityPub without domain names :(

I regret that this mini-thread did not give me an opportunity to engage in my running joke of intentionally misinterpreting the abbreviation "bsky" to mean "Bullshit, Kentucky"

Whelp looks like Bluesky finally crossed the line of "okay, when they do this, I'll set up a Bluesky account" https://bsky.social/about/blog/02-22-2024-open-social-web

So… maybe I'll do it now. IDK

I'm still pretty confused what a "PDS" is. Like exactly what the scope of its responsibilities are. Bluesky's page for the PDS server https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds explains poorly either what the software does or even what dependencies it has.

I guess I gotta go read a 18-month-old architecture document & hope it still describes reality.

A question I keep asking myself with both Mastodon/ActivityPub and BlueSky is "What is the minimum viable server you need to participate in this?"

Do you *have* to have a database server? Does it have to be a big beast like mysql/postgres or for a one-user "instance" can it just be a sqlite file?

Do you *have* to have server "software" running, or can you get by by serving static files off a (say) https server?

Do the answers to the above change if you don't care about receiving "replies"?