Comment on Bluesky
PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 4 weeks agoThat’s not quite true afact.
There are 3 types of servers:
- Personal data server (actually hosts your post)
- Relay (aggregates posts from all PDSs, responsible for federation of PDSs)
- App views (generates feeds from the relay)
Bluesky hosts the only relay I’m aware of, because relays are very expensive to host. But afaict anyone can host a relay.
So if we’re to describe it:
PDSs are nations states
Relays are the federation of those nation states
App views are like the ambassadors of the federation.
Except that PDSs can be part of multiple federations, and app views can be ambassadors for multiple federations. Ok not a great analogy.
Genius@lemmy.zip 4 weeks ago
Can two relays communicate with each other?
PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 4 weeks ago
I don’t think so?
But a single PDSs can talk to multiple relays.
And I think an app view can talk to multiple relays (or at least switch between them)
Genius@lemmy.zip 4 weeks ago
So Bluesky doesn’t have any federated servers, and couldn’t federate with itself even if there were other servers.
It’s not fediverse.
PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 4 weeks ago
It’s not Fediverse™ because it’s not activitypub.
But that doesn’t make it not federated
Just because it uses a different mechanism to achieve federation you’re going to say that it doesn’t count as federation? That’s wild.
PDSs get federated by relays.
You can have multiple relays which means you have multiple federations. This is similar to how the Fediverse ends up with pockets completely defederated from each other.
Except that a PDS can be in multiple relays (federations) which the Fediverse can’t do.
You’re right that currently there is no meaningful federation because there is only one relay, and it’s a problem that the cost is so prohibitive. But to say that it isn’t a Fediverse is kinda disingenuous.