Samuel
@samuel.fm
PDS choice is a lot easier choice to make, due to zero-friction migration. You can change your PDS at any time. And then the relay/appview choice is just a matter of which app on your phone you decide to use that day. You’re not committing to anything permanent when you make these choices
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Samuel
ok so all the data is out there, sitting on various PDSes. a relay aggregates all the data emitted from these into one single event stream. relays are effectively live views of the entire network, they don’t keep historical data. They feed into AppViews. 1/3
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Samuel
AppViews are responsive for transforming this event stream into an actual social app, by tallying like counts etc. Since relays provide updates from every PDS they can see, AppViews can thus provide a view of the entire network. Moderation, incl. regional moderation, is done at a separate level: 2/3
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Samuel
Labellers. The clients themselves are responsible for selecting which labellers to use, so moderation choice is actually pretty low friction and can be changed while still using Bluesky’s pds+relay+appview stack (see deer.social)
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Samuel
uhh should be! end of thread here:
Samuel@samuel.fm· 5 May 2025
Labellers. The clients themselves are responsible for selecting which labellers to use, so moderation choice is actually pretty low friction and can be changed while still using Bluesky’s pds+relay+appview stack (see deer.social)
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Samuel
the relay doesn’t do much at all. It’s a very simple many-to-one websocket aggregator, basically the appview is like the more traditional backend, and the client is like the iOS/android/web app. If you make your own client, for example deer.social, you can apply different moderation services
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Kuba Suder 🇵🇱🇺🇦
So then these PDS operators can advertise: "move your account here, and then you'll be browsing the Bluesky network from a European POV, not relying on a US-based company to control the presented information"
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Kuba Suder 🇵🇱🇺🇦
I think realistically, beyond just enthusiasts, the way this can become a thing on a larger scale, is if there are some public EU-based AppViews and larger EU-based PDSes, and these PDSes default to using these EU-based AppViews when you have an account on them.
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Kuba Suder 🇵🇱🇺🇦
You'd see pretty much the same network on that EU AppView with 99.9% overlap, but possibly some accounts/hosts would be not blocked here that are blocked there or the other way around, and you'd be putting some trust in a different place
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Kuba Suder 🇵🇱🇺🇦
The flip side is that it will be harder to make the network effectively decentralized, because there are less direct incentives. It will be something that will have to be pushed towards by the subset of people who care about it for various reasons.
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Kuba Suder 🇵🇱🇺🇦
Yeah, they're very different architectures with somewhat different goals and tradeoffs… AT is designed to make it so the end user has to care less about these things. So they don't have to think about any of that if they don't want to.
Ryan
Yes! Sorry, that one's known, not sure if there's an issue yet. The logic in BF for all this is...complicated 😕
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winter
isn’t it always possible that some relay never sees a given PDS, meaning that if you’re using some third-party relay, there’s always a chance you won’t see some fragment of the network? though i suppose that’s possible today if you just don’t tell the bluesky relay about your pds…
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