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The Bluesky firehose viewed in the style of a Windows XP screensaver

(firehose3d.theo.io)
590 points consumer451 | 8 comments | 16 Nov 24 22:07 UTC | HN request time: 0.349s | source | bottom
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null0pointer ◴[17 Nov 24 10:05 UTC] No.42163194[source]▶
A lot of commenters here are having their minds blown by this. And while I also love this I get the sense that many others here are maybe too young to remember that this kind of open access to data used to exist for lots websites. It inspired companion sites and loads of creativity. I find it tragic really, what the internet has become. I hope federated, and even more-so p2p, protocols take significant foothold on the internet and help revive this spirit of the web. The corpo-web is so fucking boring.
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paulgb ◴[17 Nov 24 11:13 UTC] No.42163466[source]▶
It’s worth noting that twitter itself owes a lot of its popularity to its openness in the early days. In the early days there were third-party clients, RSS feeds, XMPP support, etc. You could post from a curl command in a cron job, leading to all kinds of interesting automated feeds. Then they walked it all back in the early 2010s.

I like that Bluesky’s federation model makes it harder for them to do an “open platform” bait-and-switch like Twitter did.

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1. AshamedCaptain ◴[17 Nov 24 12:05 UTC] No.42163736[source]▶
> I like that Bluesky’s federation model makes it harder for them to do an “open platform” bait-and-switch like Twitter did.

Why would it? They can still lock everything down and few Bluesky users will even notice. This is similar to what Twitter did, or what Google Chat did, etc. Compare this to other federation platforms where a server that locks itself down loses access to a huge chunk of the network, once the other servers reciprocate.

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2. diggan ◴[17 Nov 24 12:09 UTC] No.42163757[source]▶
> Why would it?

Since migrating your personal data was a thing they thought about since day one, migrating to another network than the current one would be way easier than any centralized service and also easier than ActivityPub.

Seems there is one piece of the puzzle missing yet ("AppViews") in ATProto to be able to run completely independent, but seems they're currently working on getting that in place now.

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3. AshamedCaptain ◴[17 Nov 24 12:12 UTC] No.42163772[source]▶
You could still migrate all _your_ data to another service in Twitter quite easily, and most definitely you could in Google Chat. This did not change things.
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4. diggan ◴[17 Nov 24 12:15 UTC] No.42163784{3}[source]▶
> You could still migrate all _your_ data to another service in Twitter quite easily

Yeah? I don't remember being able to migrate from/to Twitter and taking followers/following etc with you without having to ask/request others to do something too.

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5. AshamedCaptain ◴[17 Nov 24 12:19 UTC] No.42163805{4}[source]▶
But I'm guessing that you'll also have to request your followers to use a different AppView if Bluesky did a Twitter.
6. shafyy ◴[17 Nov 24 14:12 UTC] No.42164263[source]▶
You can host your personal data, but as long as Bluesky Social, PBC is running the main Relay and AppView, and there's no easy way for Relays to talk to each other (like e.g. it works in Mastodon), they are in reality a centralized service.

Oh yes, and they are the only ones owning and developing AT Protocol, which makes it much more a currently-open-sourced protocol rather than a standard that is jointly developed by the industry.

7. rakoo ◴[17 Nov 24 15:53 UTC] No.42164807[source]▶
The big central place is still the PLC directory that effectively means all accounts are centralized at BlueSky, even if your posts are not. They haven't planned to make it any decentralized in the future.
8. YetAnotherNick ◴[18 Nov 24 07:40 UTC] No.42170532[source]▶
Nothing technical is preventing any federated platform to stop sharing the content with its peer. Only thing that prevents it is if there are multiple big peer and they can't afford a network partition, which is not the case with bluesky. Eventually VC's money will run dry and they don't have any solution for this.