I'm literally moving my mastodon instance by car right now
this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2025
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People have containerized (like literal shipping containers that comply with ISO 668 and its successors, not just software like Docker) data centers that can operate wherever they can hook up power. Put some antennas or satellite receivers on the outside, and you might be able to literally have services running from a moving vehicle or ship.
Like Pump up the Volume but instead of radio it's fedi!
Railcar. X-Files got that right. Move it across the country, tacked on the end of a freight or passenger train.
I feel like bluesky is just an attempt by a lot of institutional powers that lost a platform when Elon took over Twitter to make what essentially is a clone of Twitter circa 2018.
What a lot of people forget is that, even before Elon, Twitter had become super toxic. It was basically some pseduo-progressive echo chamber dominated by lazy journalists, virtue signaling politicians, and toxic hot takes divorced from reality. The moderation system was just selectively enforced based on whatever Twitter's SF HQ thought was relevant that day.
I like the idea of anyone being able to spin up their own server and have a space for discourse. While it can be dangerous, I'd strongly argue that having a centralized private organization deciding what is/isn't acceptable is a lot more so.
It's how forums used to be, and it worked just fine. You had to go out of your way to find communities dedicated to bigotry instead of getting forcibly pipelined into them just for joining a funny cat image group.
Fuck. It's so true to man. I literally grew up on the Internet. I could not imagine that now.
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Does anyone actually say this though? I don't think anyone who joined Bluesky did so for federation - they joined because it's not Twitter.
Yeah there's this really weird group of people on Lemmy who are obsessed with thinking Twitter and blue sky are the exact same thing. I don't know if it's because they don't get why people switch to Blue Sky or if they're trying to purposely downplay the Nazi stuff on Twitter. I really can't decide. Strongly leaning toward the latter.
You are on the Fediverse, a community centered primarily around free, open source, federated software watching every normie on the internet abandon one corpo playpen for another corpo playpen. Of course we're upset about it.
I think Bluesky is currently better than twitter, I have absolutely no faith that it will remain that way.
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Possible it's that. Could just be they hate that general format of twitter/bluesky for social media. I lump them together because I'd never use either. No clue on the actual populaces on them.
You forgot, it’s also not mastodon.
I joined because it lets me use my domain as my username without having to host an instance.
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Honestly.... Ya, literally any extra steps in signing up or slight bit of confusion is enough to make the average person give up and go back to whatever platform they are comfortable with. I've talked to people who dispise twitter but won't even switch to Bluesky because the extra dot in the user handle is too weird for them.
Yeah honestly they should make cars with one pedal. Two is just way to confusing for the average person.
Conflating ease of operation with ease of sign up. Have you ever tried to read an article online and something pops up and you left the page, even if it wasn't necessarily trying to get you to log in? That's the sort of thing they're talking about.
One-pedal driving is a feature in a number of modern cars.
Wait until I tell you about the cars with three pedals.
Hi I found a 4th pedal on the far left that doesn't come back up when I press it, and my car makes funny smells now
My bicycle only has two pedals, but the seat smells funny too.
It's probably a controversial opinion, but you could solve that problem by not sniffing bicycle seats.
Who said it was a problem?
The difference is more like automatic vs manual transmission. If you've only ever used automatic, the mere idea of gears to push is enough to scare most people out of learning. It's the same with servers/instances and social media
Edit: spelling
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ICYMI, someone did run a GoToSocial instance on their car https://masto.doskel.net/@doskel/113884312225881269
Is this really how it works? Is that per year? Hosted? Or do you own the software and can host it on your own?
There are many types of Bluesky servers. This post is about ATProto Relays, which consolidate all the data across the network into a single location. They are necessary for efficiency, but they are extremely expensive to run. Currently, there is only one ATProto relay, but there is an initiative to launch a third-party relay.
In addition, it's estimated to current cost about $500 a month just to store the contents of a relay server. this doesn't include network or computer cost. this will only get more expensive and lead to big businesses being the only players. relays, being the "Post office" of bluesky, have the power to suppress whatever they don't like.
ActivityPub really is "for the people".
But can ActivityPub scale?
Can AT Proto? It goes both ways.
In terms of infrastructure, Bluesky does seem to be capable with keeping up with the current level of 5,000,000 posts per day by pouring money into their relay. What I'd like to know is the cost per user of Bluesky compared to a centralized service like Threads.
I think one of the bigger issues with Bluesky scaling is moderation. Mastodon admins only have to deal with moderating their own instance, while ATProto labeling services can receive reports from any and all Bluesky users. So far, most people who attempted to launch an independent replacement for Bluesky Moderation Service have failed to keep up with the volume of incoming reports. Usually, they have to narrow their scope and focus on very specific issues, like Laelaps, Asuka's Anti-Transphobia Field, Blacksky Moderation, and AI Mod. However, as Bluesky grows, I even expect them to be unable to keep up.
ATProto Relays, which consolidate all the data across the network into a single location. They are necessary for efficiency
How? And the fediverse works the other way around.
Basically, on ATProto, everyone stores their own data on a PDS (Personal Data Server). This includes every post, image, video, follow, like, block, etc. The relay crawls the open web for PDSs to consolidate into a single stream of data.
From here, services can build off of that single data stream without needing to do any crawling of their own.
Of course, this does give the operator of the relay a lot of power. If they were to block your PDS, then only services relying on a different relay can access your data. This is especially why it is important that there exist independent third-party relays, but no one has taken up the mantle yet.
The PDS design is a nice approach to making AT Proto distributed. But, the way they chose to operate relays means that the protocol requires massive investment to run.
The absolute minimum spend for a node right now, even with Bluesky still growing, is something like tens of thousands of dollars per year. If Bluesky does become the next Twitter, it will probably be $100k+ per year to run a relay. That means a company could run a relay, maybe a university could run one, but it's way out of the reach of anyone but the richest of individual users.
Can't someone theoretically make an Activitypub relay which hosts information from all private instances that federate with it? Like, how is this (AT Protocol) better
They already exist, they range from smaller webring like relays to ones that tie the major nodes together.
Neat! Does that mean there's an ActivityPub equivalent to the ATProto Firehose?
The Internet is just a fad. Wait until everyone logs into a single central server in Virginia. One database is all you need for Earth.
Samsung Smart fridge instance coming soon?
Unless the instance can run in Doom, I'm not interested.
Ah yes, the tragedy of any federation, most people don't want to pay attention to every little thing in their lives so when one central node becomes "good enough" it's easiest to relinquish control for as long as it works.
I can think of one very large federation experiment in the world that went the same way.
Hell, lemmy.world is already the defacto way to engage here.
I think that what a lot of people don't realize is that BlueSky is federated in order to make their corporate infrastructure stronger and easier for them to operate.
I'll take three!
What I am unsure about is whether this is a BS or AT thing. There are people expressing interest in using AT to make versions of other popular services (like TikTok, Instagram, etc) but would they face similar costs to run a relay? If so, and it would mean you either need VC or charity backing (millionaires either way), I fail to see the point when we already have everything chugging along here on AP - with an investment of a fraction of that money we could make on-boarding slicker and help iron out other niggles that occur when you are developing on a shoestring.
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