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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

What went wrong with Wsocial?

I don't mind the quasi-central nature of bsky, it's more of a problem that it's so heavily dominated by US politics.

> it's more of a problem that it's so heavily dominated by US politics.

I agree the default Discovery feed is not great, but you can just switch to a different feed like For You or the recent Eurosky version of it, called 'fu'. It vastly improves the experience.

Or join a European Mastodon server and solve the problem at the root.

and only have one feed? forgive me if I understand incorrectly but I'll take an open market of thousands of feeds and easy tooling to make my own that can pull from the whole network over just one local feed controlled by a server admin

https://blog.elenarossini.com/w-social-a-broken-ghost-town/

Basically, because they didn't warn Bluesky that they were going live, they had their traffic heavily trottled and they were unable to function.

So long for decentralisation if you need to talk to the owner of the protocol you are trying to use...

It's not that they didn't warn bluesky specifically. It's that they didn't warn relay operators in general. And IIRC they just needed to coordinate with a single relay operator who is reasonably trusted (ex blacksky or eurosky) but they didn't do that either.

The default rate limits are quite reasonable but big launches will blow past them so you gotta coordinate with someone.

And note that the relay federation/gossip agreements are largely manual configuration at the moment. Until someone pushes a proposal for an automated/dynamic topology management algorithm that doesn't get plagued with spam issues it'll stay this way.

No such problem on Mastodon/ActivityPub.

It absolutely is. Mastodon has rate limits and administrators have to manage and adjust them as necessary for their instances.

You probably just don't notice it as a user or as the operator of a small instance which to be fair is exactly the same with atproto. Users rarely notice rate limits and small operators rarely do either. It's the operators of large services that see these limits and have to coordinate with other operators.

The issue with W social is that they have a chronic inability to coordinate or play nice with anyone else in the atproto space. Rate limits aren't a problem if you are a good neighbor and you know your neighbors but frankly they just don't.

My Mastodon instance blocked Threads preemptively because they were afraid of the traffic driving up their hosting costs so you’re basically just very wrong or lying about this. A huge flood of incoming traffic can be hugely expensive for ActivityPub node operators. The problem of giant onboarding events is real, there’s just no default protection against them in Mastodon like there is in Bluesky, so operators either have to take matters into their own hands with defederation or risk driving their bill through the roof.

Wsocial turned out to be a WEF honeypot or something.

That is not the point.

The point is that without talking with Bluesky, you cannot start your own ATProto product or you'll get throttled from the network.

Almost like the network is centralised.

Tons of people have started products without issue. But if you flood a popular relay with data that exceeds its rate limit then getting throttled is to be expected. This doesn’t prevent your participation in the protocol or network.

There are other relays and indexes out there that may have different rate limits. That’s just how these things work. The data from W is still there on their PDS, still public, still crawlable, and able to be backfilled within rate limits.

This is a non-issue.

That literally prevents your participation in the network, because you need the relay to be forwarding your messages to participate in the network. There is only one relay in BlueSky that matters. If the BlueSky relay is not relaying your messages, then you aren't on BlueSky.

Bluesky is not all of atproto, first of all. There are a bunch of apps thats don’t use any relay at all. Second, even if you aren’t on bsky’s relay, there are others, like the Blacksky relay.

I’m guessing from your constantly-incorrect capitalization of “BlueSky” that you’re not familiar with any of this even a little bit and you’re just repeating what you’ve heard from other, equally unfamiliar people.

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