Yes but in this specific case the author owns up to using Claude for "editing" of the blog entries.

Pretty funny to see this here because this blog post seems like written with AI assistance ("it's not just x, it's y", etc.) and also its author advocates for Nostr instead.

Not a silver bullet by any means, but it is refreshing to see some issues being addressed after the whole moderation debacle last week. Paul Frazee also wrote a blog post saying they want to move away from PDS-level account takedowns except where legally required or to combat spam/network abuse.

Definitionally, an AppView is not just a different frontend, it's perhaps better described as an indexer, it's a sense-making tool for the raw data of the firehose with its own API. And Blacksky.community as of now is still using the bsky.app API.

You can verify this yourself with developer tools:

Thus, Blacksky.community is a different frontend, but not a different AppView. The only full parity alternative AppView to my knowledge is still Zeppelin.social.

You can (and should) log in with app passwords instead of your actual password for sure. You can revoke them in your settings if anything goes wrong. As for Zeppelin, I can only say that its creator Futur has good standing in the community, but I understand if people are still wary.

Hey that's my screenshot! :)

Rudy Fraser and the Blacksky team also have a custom frontend (https://blacksky.community/) with some cool stuff like a sign-up feature with a custom domain picker, but it's still using the Bsky API under the hood. Which is fine, can't be overstated how hard it must be to reimplement the entire API.

Evan Prodromou commented to say he "disagrees with the purpose of this statement".

I don't understand what he gets out of being so antagonizing. Lovely statement though, nice to see so many signatures.

you need thousands of dollars

no you don't

Search up “Mastodon instances” and then “Bluesky instances”

Bluesky has a different architecture, there are no "instances", it's PDSs, relays and AppViews, all of which can be and are already being self-hosted.

they’re just jumping on the train with the billionaire who runs it

If you mean Dorsey, he has had nothing to do with Bluesky for well over a year now because he resented them implementing moderation tools

well I mean technically not, Kuba is self-hosting his account at https://lab.martianbase.net/

I might be wrong, but feeds get their data from relays, correct? So if you are using any of the Blacksky feeds, presumably you would indirectly be using the atproto.africa relay?

You mention the costs of running a relay as mentioned in the Christine Lemmer-Webber piece, but since that piece was written, Bluesky made a significant update to how relays work, making them much cheaper to operate. Bryan Newbold made a blog post about how he managed to run a relay for $34 a month. Dozens of people run such full-network relays now! Christine Lemmer-Webber herself even first assumed those were not pulling the full network, but later corrected herself!

It remains to be seen how well all of that will scale if the network continues to grow, but can we please please move away from completely exaggerated claims like "it costs millions to run an independent node"?

I'm more thinking about users on small instances that are being abandoned or perhaps fall victim to some defederation drama (or similar) over time.