I'm left wondering if maybe all the years I spend tinkering with Linux servers and self-hosted infrastructure are just about to pay off big time now that there is a massive move for governments and institutions to take control of their infrastructure... You still pretty much need a human to spin and maintain infrastructure, wire things securely, and monitor... Now I just need to wait until someone rebrands sysop into something cool sounding like Sovereign Re-orchestration Professional, or Reacquisition Specialist... Data Nationalisation Champion
Joking aside, there is a lot of contract work lately [1] to help EU quasi-governative entities to move off US clouds. I have been on contract for the last 18 months to recreate some functionality of AWS on top of OVH for a client adjacent to the European Space Agency.
The catch is that being government contract you, the guy doing the actual work, are beneath three or four layers of companies and bureaucracy and you get over engineered yet somehow too vague specs and projects that take 6 months just to get approved. But hey, the pay is good, and it’s for one of the better causes.
1: even in government work the job and economy situation is a big question mark and appetite to invest has lessened dramatically so YMMV
I do this at significant scale and you need a high tolerance for a lot of different negatives to last doing it for governments (and adjacent).
The only exception to this rule I would say is AWS GovCloud, which also might be one of the only chill teams to work at across Amazon. It turns out having "only one way to do it", a system proved through a rigorous vetting process and a thoroughly worked-through contracting process leads to a pretty fantastic work environment for practitioners.
Trying to reimplement that piecemeal is for tougher men than me though. I think I'd rather sit on hot nails.
So the "news" here is they're hosting their own PDS? I think that was the main point of Atmosphere and Bluesky was just a popular gateway to get people into it.
> "Since Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, we have been missing a digital village square where public debate can take place in (relative) safety."
The ironic thing is Twitter is actually the square of public debate and Bluesky is just a echo chamber just like Reddit. Just try having a debate on these platforms. You will literally get banned, your post deleted or muted.
You have to be pretty spicy if you are getting banned from Reddit, as opposed to being modded. In the later case, you can set up your own subreddit, surely?
I was banned from Reddit for saying that a well
recognised terrorist group should be destroyed. Other people are banned from agreeing with trans ideology.
I got banned from my local subreddit for saying “as an Asian we actually tend to like cars from this brand” in a politically charged post about a certain car brand. Didn’t seem very spicy to me. “If you support this brand you’re supporting Nazis” was allowed and upvoted, of course.
On the bright side that was the impetus for me to finally stop giving my valuable attention to that site.
You're proposing a fiction that there is functionally any difference. Migrating a subreddit is a large community effort and rarely if ever happens over just one ban.
If you're banned from a subreddit for X, which famously happens for often the thinnest of reasonings, you're effectively out of the online community around X. For some subreddits this even has real-world implications. You don't have to be the least bit spicy to do this. Often you just have to have commented (at all) in a different subreddit that a mod doesn't like.
Happened to me, the mod did not like the fact that I had engaged with a sub that he does not politically agree on, It was a university centric sub that I got banned from. Could never take that site seriously, ever.
...As opposed to Twitter where I was banned for expressing an opinion that wasn't in line with the site owner's personal opinions. At least with Bluesky, you can opt out of their moderation.
Twitter is the eternal September. The other places populated by the few who were discerning enough to leave are just normal online communities like we used to have before they reached internet culture war scale.
Honest question: Bluesky was touted as the next distributed, uncensorable, truly-free social network, but in practice I see all posts from right-of center users obscured, much more than old Twitter or, in practice, any other social network (look at the Babylon Bee account, which is a satirical website leaning to the right, censored to oblivion: https://bsky.app/profile/realbabylonbee.bsky.social). Will Eurosky be the same? If yes, why ATProto is "cool" if, in practice, the social networks built upon it are the most sectarian places on the Internet?
You might want to answer two questions before we start this discussion:
1. "Censored" by whom, and for whom?
2. "Censored" for which "right of center" views?
P.S. I should also mention that I can see the posts on that account, even if they all have flags for intolerance by the default moderation service (a service you can opt out of by the way).
"Censored" I mean "flagged", sure. In practice, they're all hidden from the casual user. But really, I'm interested on why ATProto was touted as revolutionary while in practice it powers a standalone heavily politically biased social network where moderators are extremely active flagging everything that's on the right. In that respect, Mastodon is more "revolutionary" - you handle your instance, you provide your moderation, you optionally integrate with other instances. Mastodon itself is used, in practice, to moderate a highly diverse ecosystem of social networks, from the gay-friendly ones to Gab. Nostr, although it's not so widely used, is even more tailored against sectarism by default.
From what I see, Bsky is a single instance of one of the most politically aligned social media in existence; in practice, you can achieve that with any proprietary implementation, you don't need ATProto. I honestly thought that the protocol was engineered to prevent an echo chamber, but in reality it powers an enormous standalone echo chamber that is not moving anywhere, so I was wondering what's the difference.
@phillipcarter: of course it's users (and mods) doing that, but in the end, if you open bsky today you see a single, huge, left-biased social media. If you look at Mastodon, you see at a lot left-leaning trans-and-furry-friendly instances, true, but you also see a bunch of right wing instances plus Gab. What happens with bsky today (single instance, echo chambered) is simply something I don't expect from a "distributed" social network. Why is that?
What you are describing is, bluntly, not happening.
Bluesky moderators take down abusive and harmful posts. There is a daily uproar on the left about how they do this to "kiwifarms but leftishly" behavior under the guise of being "anti-trans". If right-wing centered posts are getting taken down, it is because they are abusive and harmful.
Bluesky popularized subscriber lists, like blocklists. A large portion of the network mass-mutes or mass-blocks anyone on the big right-wing block lists. This is user behavior, not the platform censoring right wing people.
Right-wingers are so reliably sore winners. X is still comfortably the dominant microblogging platform on the internet, Facebook and Youtube happily boost and feed right-wing content and concerns. Tiktok has been brought to heel. ATproto hasn't found a way to encode communism - just like activitypub could be used for Truth Social - the ATmosphere will turn right once the ecosystem is in anyway relevant politically or commercially. But you could always start quatrechan while we wait
My question was in good faith tbh; I see other protocols (Mastodon, nostr) not being really commercially relevant but being much more politically diverse than bsky. I was wondering why is that - is something inherent to the protocol (e.g. I heard that it's extremely hard to set up your "alternative bsky" if you don't have resources, unlike Mastodon instances, so you're not really incentivized to just do it and see how it goes) or is it just bad luck?
Yes, AT proto is about making data available to the public via replication. There's no privacy at all, but it's useful for some things. Hacker News comments don't have any privacy either.
There's another protocol in the works that should be useful for syncing private data:
This is great. The entire idea of AT is that users can move their data for any reason. We want more of this.
But I do think it's always worth pushing back a bit on this idea:
> "The way Bluesky is funded is at odds with the idea of decentralisation because the platform relies on venture capital and operates under a shareholder model."
Large decentralized infrastructure like the internet, DNS, email, and the web was largely built by VC-backed companies.
The most important open source project, Linux, is funded by major tech companies through the Linux Foundation, with $311 million last year.
Corporate incentives do create conflicts, so it makes sense to be paranoid and skeptical. But the idea that companies can't contribute to open and decentralized systems is exactly the wrong lesson to learn.
We want more VC-backed startups working on open social networks and protocols. It would be great if many of them were in Europe.
There were famously government and university programs that played important early roles too. But it was largely people working for companies that actually built these systems.
What organizations do you think created the switches, routers, servers, software, fiber optic backbones? Who created the new protocols?
It was companies like AT&T/Bell Labs, Cisco, 3Com, Sun, UUNET, Netscape, AOL, the major telecoms, and a thousand other companies we don't remember.
Something like 1% inspiration from academia and government, and 99% perspiration by people working inside companies.
"Commercialized" is probably the word you want, and I'd agree with.
It turns out that commercialization is most of the work of creating a globally decentralized system. Which doesn't mean the non-commercial work wasn't critical.
I am sure that DARPA, BBN, USC Information Sciences Institute, and many others will be overjoyed to learn that they've been erased from history by the new narrative that Venture Capitalists Built Everything. (-:
Initially, yes, and then they became an important commercial internet service and backbone provider. They were quickly joined by a huge wave of other private companies, almost all VC-backed.
I'm left wondering if maybe all the years I spend tinkering with Linux servers and self-hosted infrastructure are just about to pay off big time now that there is a massive move for governments and institutions to take control of their infrastructure... You still pretty much need a human to spin and maintain infrastructure, wire things securely, and monitor... Now I just need to wait until someone rebrands sysop into something cool sounding like Sovereign Re-orchestration Professional, or Reacquisition Specialist... Data Nationalisation Champion
Joking aside, there is a lot of contract work lately [1] to help EU quasi-governative entities to move off US clouds. I have been on contract for the last 18 months to recreate some functionality of AWS on top of OVH for a client adjacent to the European Space Agency.
The catch is that being government contract you, the guy doing the actual work, are beneath three or four layers of companies and bureaucracy and you get over engineered yet somehow too vague specs and projects that take 6 months just to get approved. But hey, the pay is good, and it’s for one of the better causes.
1: even in government work the job and economy situation is a big question mark and appetite to invest has lessened dramatically so YMMV
SDS, Sovereign Data Specialist ;)
I do this at significant scale and you need a high tolerance for a lot of different negatives to last doing it for governments (and adjacent).
The only exception to this rule I would say is AWS GovCloud, which also might be one of the only chill teams to work at across Amazon. It turns out having "only one way to do it", a system proved through a rigorous vetting process and a thoroughly worked-through contracting process leads to a pretty fantastic work environment for practitioners.
Trying to reimplement that piecemeal is for tougher men than me though. I think I'd rather sit on hot nails.
Cloud repatriation engineer, infra sovereignty strategist. Are sysadmins back? Too early to tell imho.
https://xkcd.com/705/
Better job titles than any AI CEO could come up with!
You win. Cloud repatriation engineer.
So the "news" here is they're hosting their own PDS? I think that was the main point of Atmosphere and Bluesky was just a popular gateway to get people into it.
Unless I'm missing something else...
That's the plan, but to get to actual decentralization, one of the steps is for more people to actually move their PDS's somewhere other than Bluesky.
(They are not self-hosting; Eurosky is doing it.)
You won’t have decentralisation on Atproto because the protocol itself incentivises centralisation.
But... if Waag are not self-hosting, and they're not, how likely is it that normal people will start doing so in relatively large numbers?
An important part of how this works is that you don't have to make that choice right away.
I've been meaning to move to my own PDS for a few months now. Still haven't. Whenever I decide to get around to it, it'll be fine.
I don't think that's the goal? If we got to the point where no service hosts the majority of accounts, that would be a pretty good milestone.
> "Since Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, we have been missing a digital village square where public debate can take place in (relative) safety."
The ironic thing is Twitter is actually the square of public debate and Bluesky is just a echo chamber just like Reddit. Just try having a debate on these platforms. You will literally get banned, your post deleted or muted.
You have to be pretty spicy if you are getting banned from Reddit, as opposed to being modded. In the later case, you can set up your own subreddit, surely?
I was banned from Reddit for saying that a well recognised terrorist group should be destroyed. Other people are banned from agreeing with trans ideology.
I got banned from my local subreddit for saying “as an Asian we actually tend to like cars from this brand” in a politically charged post about a certain car brand. Didn’t seem very spicy to me. “If you support this brand you’re supporting Nazis” was allowed and upvoted, of course.
On the bright side that was the impetus for me to finally stop giving my valuable attention to that site.
You almost certainly are lying and were not banned for saying that.
You're proposing a fiction that there is functionally any difference. Migrating a subreddit is a large community effort and rarely if ever happens over just one ban.
If you're banned from a subreddit for X, which famously happens for often the thinnest of reasonings, you're effectively out of the online community around X. For some subreddits this even has real-world implications. You don't have to be the least bit spicy to do this. Often you just have to have commented (at all) in a different subreddit that a mod doesn't like.
Happened to me, the mod did not like the fact that I had engaged with a sub that he does not politically agree on, It was a university centric sub that I got banned from. Could never take that site seriously, ever.
Banned from Twitter for a 2-word response:
https://bsky.app/profile/gilduran.com/post/3mky5taqg3222
Plus news organizations are punished for including links in their content.
https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/04/do-links-hurt-news-publish...
Bluesky is also where you had people cheering for the assassination of federal agents and hosting CSAM material ?
When I hear someone uses bluesky a lot, I cant help but feel suspicious of them
Twitter? The CSAM and Nazi propaganda app?
...As opposed to Twitter where I was banned for expressing an opinion that wasn't in line with the site owner's personal opinions. At least with Bluesky, you can opt out of their moderation.
Did your opinion call for the use of violence ? That is a no go zone.
Twitter is the eternal September. The other places populated by the few who were discerning enough to leave are just normal online communities like we used to have before they reached internet culture war scale.
Honest question: Bluesky was touted as the next distributed, uncensorable, truly-free social network, but in practice I see all posts from right-of center users obscured, much more than old Twitter or, in practice, any other social network (look at the Babylon Bee account, which is a satirical website leaning to the right, censored to oblivion: https://bsky.app/profile/realbabylonbee.bsky.social). Will Eurosky be the same? If yes, why ATProto is "cool" if, in practice, the social networks built upon it are the most sectarian places on the Internet?
You might want to answer two questions before we start this discussion:
1. "Censored" by whom, and for whom?
2. "Censored" for which "right of center" views?
P.S. I should also mention that I can see the posts on that account, even if they all have flags for intolerance by the default moderation service (a service you can opt out of by the way).
"Censored" I mean "flagged", sure. In practice, they're all hidden from the casual user. But really, I'm interested on why ATProto was touted as revolutionary while in practice it powers a standalone heavily politically biased social network where moderators are extremely active flagging everything that's on the right. In that respect, Mastodon is more "revolutionary" - you handle your instance, you provide your moderation, you optionally integrate with other instances. Mastodon itself is used, in practice, to moderate a highly diverse ecosystem of social networks, from the gay-friendly ones to Gab. Nostr, although it's not so widely used, is even more tailored against sectarism by default.
From what I see, Bsky is a single instance of one of the most politically aligned social media in existence; in practice, you can achieve that with any proprietary implementation, you don't need ATProto. I honestly thought that the protocol was engineered to prevent an echo chamber, but in reality it powers an enormous standalone echo chamber that is not moving anywhere, so I was wondering what's the difference.
I'm not fully aware of the tech here, are those posts flagged as 'Intolerant' by bsky or by the protocol itself?
@phillipcarter: of course it's users (and mods) doing that, but in the end, if you open bsky today you see a single, huge, left-biased social media. If you look at Mastodon, you see at a lot left-leaning trans-and-furry-friendly instances, true, but you also see a bunch of right wing instances plus Gab. What happens with bsky today (single instance, echo chambered) is simply something I don't expect from a "distributed" social network. Why is that?
What you are describing is, bluntly, not happening.
Bluesky moderators take down abusive and harmful posts. There is a daily uproar on the left about how they do this to "kiwifarms but leftishly" behavior under the guise of being "anti-trans". If right-wing centered posts are getting taken down, it is because they are abusive and harmful.
Bluesky popularized subscriber lists, like blocklists. A large portion of the network mass-mutes or mass-blocks anyone on the big right-wing block lists. This is user behavior, not the platform censoring right wing people.
Right-wingers are so reliably sore winners. X is still comfortably the dominant microblogging platform on the internet, Facebook and Youtube happily boost and feed right-wing content and concerns. Tiktok has been brought to heel. ATproto hasn't found a way to encode communism - just like activitypub could be used for Truth Social - the ATmosphere will turn right once the ecosystem is in anyway relevant politically or commercially. But you could always start quatrechan while we wait
My question was in good faith tbh; I see other protocols (Mastodon, nostr) not being really commercially relevant but being much more politically diverse than bsky. I was wondering why is that - is something inherent to the protocol (e.g. I heard that it's extremely hard to set up your "alternative bsky" if you don't have resources, unlike Mastodon instances, so you're not really incentivized to just do it and see how it goes) or is it just bad luck?
And what does this do safety/privacy-wise?
Nothing, except make it more available.
This is why I often argue against (or at least want to point out the dangers of) the ATProto/Bluesky model.
It's an absolute boon for people who want heavy surveillance, government or otherwise.
The looseness and "unreliability" of protocols like Mastodon ironically make them safer.
Yes, AT proto is about making data available to the public via replication. There's no privacy at all, but it's useful for some things. Hacker News comments don't have any privacy either.
There's another protocol in the works that should be useful for syncing private data:
https://github.com/bluesky-social/proposals/pull/94
I am genuinely confused. Isn't the point of public social media to be... public? Or do you use BlueSky to talk to your friends, instead of Signal?
This is great. The entire idea of AT is that users can move their data for any reason. We want more of this.
But I do think it's always worth pushing back a bit on this idea:
> "The way Bluesky is funded is at odds with the idea of decentralisation because the platform relies on venture capital and operates under a shareholder model."
Large decentralized infrastructure like the internet, DNS, email, and the web was largely built by VC-backed companies.
The most important open source project, Linux, is funded by major tech companies through the Linux Foundation, with $311 million last year.
Corporate incentives do create conflicts, so it makes sense to be paranoid and skeptical. But the idea that companies can't contribute to open and decentralized systems is exactly the wrong lesson to learn.
We want more VC-backed startups working on open social networks and protocols. It would be great if many of them were in Europe.
>Large decentralized infrastructure like the internet, DNS, email, and the web was largely built by VC-backed companies.
The poor need the rich to start a company as banks are prevented (by the rich) from lending to them.
The rich like VC as it's a tax write-off, they invest in VCs and get even more richer.
Most startups fail, the VC's investors get any leftovers and poor founder walks off empty.
>What about when things go wrong?
In general, if you lose money on an investment, you can offset that “capital loss” against a capital gain you have from something else.
https://www.venturesouth.vc/write-offs
> the internet, DNS, email, and the web were largely built by VC-backed companies
Really ?
There were famously government and university programs that played important early roles too. But it was largely people working for companies that actually built these systems.
What organizations do you think created the switches, routers, servers, software, fiber optic backbones? Who created the new protocols?
It was companies like AT&T/Bell Labs, Cisco, 3Com, Sun, UUNET, Netscape, AOL, the major telecoms, and a thousand other companies we don't remember.
Something like 1% inspiration from academia and government, and 99% perspiration by people working inside companies.
How many of those organizations you named were VC-backed?
Cisco, backed early by Sequoia.
3Com, raised $1.1M from three venture capitalists in 1981.
Sun, a Kleiner Perkins portfolio company.
UUNET, raised from Accel, Menlo, and NEA in 1993.
Netscape, backed by Kleiner Perkins.
AOL, backed by Kleiner Perkins.
Yeah that raised my eyebrow as well. "Popularized" maybe, but "largely built" I think is a mis-characterization.
"Commercialized" is probably the word you want, and I'd agree with.
It turns out that commercialization is most of the work of creating a globally decentralized system. Which doesn't mean the non-commercial work wasn't critical.
I am sure that DARPA, BBN, USC Information Sciences Institute, and many others will be overjoyed to learn that they've been erased from history by the new narrative that Venture Capitalists Built Everything. (-:
BBN was a private company...
A private company doing DARPA-funded research.
Initially, yes, and then they became an important commercial internet service and backbone provider. They were quickly joined by a huge wave of other private companies, almost all VC-backed.