Why Feditips is either ignorant, stupid, or both.

I am going straaaight to name-calling I don't care anymore

Very recently I had the great displeasure of arguing with FediTips which you may know for creating all kinds of informational content about the Fediverse and surrounding topics on their website, fedi.tips/.

That's great and all, if not for all the blatant disinformation regarding...literally any microblogging or even social media platform at all that isn't the Fediverse. Most notably, Bluesky.

FediTips, or rather the person behind it, Fedithings loves spreading plain disinformation regarding Bluesky and completely disregarding proven facts about Bluesky. Facts that are obvious by just reading one or two pages of the spec overview or the Wikipedia page on ATProto.

On the Fediverse, as I'm sure most of you will know, we use a sort of “message-passing” approach to sharing our posts around the network; We pass our posts directly to those which should see it, and we know who should see it because “oh hey, that guy followed me that one time!”. This is great! Everyone gets their posts no matter where they are, from completely different communities! (unless you deny them, we'll get to that)

These places, communities are often referred to as “Instances”. It's basically just the fancy term for communities though. But it's important to keep that in the back of your head for the rest of this.

Another important detail to keep in mind is how, on the Fediverse, your identity is usually tied to the community you chose. Your handle will quite literally look something like @[url=https://blog.cyrneko.eu/@/sunny@wonderful.garden]sunny@wonderful.garden[/url] (I don't think that's a real instance...I hope lol) and people will see you as being from that community

What about Bluesky? Oh boy, Completely different model.

Are there even instances?

To get this right out of the way: No. At least not how you think.

Whereas in the context of the Fediverse and all our communities we just sort of pass posts around directly, like people sending eachother letters, Bluesky went a different route

There is basically three important components:

• Personal Data Servers – This is where the posts are
• Relays – This is what gets the post from A to B
• AppViews – Fancy speak for “the app the posts are in” / “The Bluesky app”

now, Personal Data Servers sort of explain themselves. It's where your posts are. If you or anyone else wants to go right to the source of those memes and shitposts, that's where they'll find them. Right open for everyone to see.

I'll refer to Personal Data Servers as just “PDS” from here on out.

Relays then take the posts from every single PDS they can possibly find and turns them into one long, always-updating list of all posts in the order they were posted.

And the AppView has the job of, well, letting you actually see those posts and interact with them; Make new posts, like stuff, share stuff. You know the drill

Notice how I didn't say what data is stored on a PDS? That's actually an important detail to know, so let's compare

So with a Fediverse server, because you're passing posts directly between eachother as if they're letters, you need to hold on to the posts yourself so that you can, well...read them.

This means that you have a copy of not just your posts, but also the posts of everyone you follow and interact with regularly. Anyone that appears on the feed, basically

On Bluesky though? You don't keep the posts of others, only your own are stored. Well, your own and anyone you happen to share space with on the PDS.

What is “defederation”?

Now we're back to the whole “denying” thing that I hinted at earlier.

Due to the fact that posts are exchanged directly between people, there might be like superevilcommunity.com that does nothing but send you like hatred or something else you plain don't like. And blocking those communities is known as “defederation”

Now, this is a stark difference to how Bluesky fundamentally works.

Because everyone gets their posts from the same place, the Relay, one cannot really block the server a post comes from; You're not getting it from there anyways.

But even if they did filter out posts of that kind, there is another issue that makes it near impossible to have this sort of moderation tool.

Account Portability and Moderation

Bluesky had one arguably good reason to not use the same tech that the Fediverse uses: Fedi's account moving ability is not robust enough.

on the Fediverse, you can move your account to a different server by setting up an “alias” or “redirect”. This will make it so that anyone which follows you will automatically follow the new account, and anyone that searches for your old account will be redirected to the new one.

But for Bluesky, this wasn't enough. Posts weren't moved across, and you had to take up an entirely new identity on that new community. So for their new tech they were developing, they have a new identifier that isn't tied to a server. This is called a DID:PLC identifier.

The important thing here, just so I don't lose myself in technical details, is that even when you were previously at one given server it is trivial to move to another one, keeping this identity. Unlike a fediverse identity which is tied to the community it was on.

And this is why “defederation” doesn't work on Bluesky.

The Point

The things I've discussed here are basically a breakdown of what I talked about with Feditips.

Repeatedly, feditips refused to acknowledge the fact that Bluesky works differently, that it isn't even “federation” per-se, and eventually they pulled the “think of the minorities which are scared for their lives” card.

social.growyourown.services/@F… (archive)

On a Trans person. They were talking to a trans person. That is one of the minorities which are scared for their life.

At that point, I stopped talking to them and advised them to shut the fuck up

Feditips does this on the regular. They frequently spread disinformation about Bluesky in an effort to feed their superiority complex for using a different social media site. They blame those which use Bluesky and see them as below themselves. You can see them posting about oh how much better the fediverse is on the regular.

Preaching to the choir, on the fediverse.
my {preferred term} in christ, you don't need to preach to fediverse users how good the fediverse is. Especially when those which ACTUALLY moderate and run communities and those which have been here for MUCH LONGER THAN YOU all agree that no, the Fediverse is not this perfect safe haven. Far from it.

If you come to me screaming about how “think of the minorities” how come I don't see you taking action on transmasc erasure on fedi, or how people of color are treated on fedi? Those are marginalized too, and you say you care so much about safety which is why you redirect everyone there. Why can't they find a home here? Could it be that fedi is...not perfect? That the structure we've built over many years makes it at best uncomfortable for those people to be here?

No, it couldn't be. The fediverse is perfect and we are all superior for using it. What's that, Blacksky is a thing and they are running completely independent infrastructure for the black community? No no, you must be hallucinating. What is that, they in large parts feel much safer there? Nope. Can't be. The Fediverse is perfect.

expanding on blacksky a bit...Just to expand on this a little bit, everything I've seen from the blacksky community is genuinely amazing. They are building their community and keeping eachother safe, and it is working much better on there than anything I've seen on fedi. Seriously, these people make their own software completely independent from Bluesky PBLLC, and I've heard some rumours they even want to have their own AppView.

Thank you for reading.

↓ it'd mean a lot if you supported my work ↓

liberapay.com/cyrnekoko-fi.com/cyrnekoAny little bit helps ❤

↓ it'd mean a lot if you supported my work ↓

liberapay.com/cyrnekoko-fi.com/cyrnekoAny little bit helps ❤

Wafrn post by alexia

hey I don't wanna say anything but you are talking to that minority. Shut your mouth and do not use our fear to drive your point you prick.

^{app.wafrn.net}

I see a lot of misinformation about bluesky here, so I want to address a lot of the talking points against atproto/bluesky.

This is partially inspired by accounts like mastodon migration and feditips being really annoying about bluesky.

How Bluesky Works

I see a lot of people misunderstanding how it works.
The network has three main parts:
1. A PDS -- This stands for Personal Data Server. These store information in records, like who you are following, your posts, who you are blocking and your images.
2. A relay -- These crawl PDSes and keep a copy of all the records on them. They give a "Firehose" of all the data on the network (that they crawled).
3. An AppView -- These index and work through the data from the firehose. All interactions are handled through these, meaning if someone follows me on bluesky, that app.bsky.graph.follow record will be crawled by the relay, and recieved by the AppView. bsky.app/ is an Appview. Appviews don't always have to use the relays, whtwnd.com/ connects to PDSes directly.

This is different to ActivityPub, where if I follow someone, my server sends that information directly to the other person's server.

Common misconceptions

An atproto relay is too expensive to run.

atproto.africa/ is a second full-network relay run by the blacksky team. We already have a second relay, and they're not even that expensive to run anymore, a lot of people run non-archival (meaning it doesn't backfill every post) relays for less than $40 a month.

There is no instances available except for bsky.social

bsky.social isn't actually an instance, its just the domain name assigned to users by default. This is explained here: app.wafrn.net/fediverse/post/f…

Wafrn has (opt-in) bluesky support, they act as a PDS and AppView, so if bluesky disappears tomorrow they can switch to the atproto.africa relay. (There is DID:PLC which is a problem, but I'll get to that later.)

You can't defederate bsky.social, this proves atproto is centralised!

app.wafrn.net/fediverse/post/f… also explains this, bsky.social is just the name assigned to users, each PDS has names like brittlegill.us-west.host.bsky.… (where my account is).

While you could ignore records from a specific PDS on the App layer, its pretty pointless, since atproto is portable/content addressed, meaning a user could seamlessly move to another PDS. (AP does support moving, but its pretty seamful.)

(While I was writing this someone posted a pretty good blogpost about this: blog.cyrneko.eu/there-is-no-bs…)

Bluesky can censor people in turkey, this proves they're centralised!

Those posts weren't removed, people on third party bluesky apps in turkey could still see them.
People in Turkey are automatically subscribed to a Moderation Service which hides those posts, as the government requires it.
If a person unsubscribes, or uses a third party app/server the posts are still there.

Bluesky isn't decentralised as someone was banned for pointing out the head of T&S liked jailbait porn.

That person came back on a different PDS. They literally are still on bluesky because they joined a different server.

Bluesky went down due to a DDoS, this proves they are centralised!

The DDoS only crashed the Bluesky PDSes. People self hosting were fine.

Wafrn

Wafrn is a federated tumblr alternative. It started off as a tumblr clone, the dev added AP support, and eventually, Atproto support.
Its a great example of how bluesky can be built on.
If bluesky disappeared tomorrow, Wafrn could switch relays to atproto.africa, and still interact with people on other PDSes.

AppViewLite

appviewlite is a cool project I forgot to mention in the original post. It lets you self host an extremely lightweight Appview.
You can crawl PDSes yourself, eliminating the need for a relay.

github.com/alnkesq/AppViewLite

The main reason I made this post is because so many people are blindly anti-atproto, without fully understanding how it works and how it can be improved.

There is obviously problems with it, but it does a lot right. (There's a lot ActivityPub should do, like content addressing, DIDs and composable moderation).

I also think we could do with a better bridge. bridgy isn't really cutting it right now.

Note on did:plc, its the only centralised part of the network as of now, its essentially the underlying ID every account has. It is possible to use a did:web id instead, which is tied to a website name.

Wafrn post by alexia

Well to answer that we must first look at how bsky.social is just the auto-assigned domains for new users the underlying servers are all hosted at subdomains of .bsky.network, luckily mary-e

^{app.wafrn.net}

alexia's blog

2025-06-22 13:23:16

There is no bsky.social instance:

Why Feditips is either ignorant, stupid, or both.

I am going straaaight to name-calling I don't care anymore

---

Very recently I had the great displeasure of arguing with FediTips which you may know for creating all kinds of informational content about the Fediverse and surrounding topics on their website, fedi.tips/.

That's great and all, if not for all the blatant disinformation regarding...literally any microblogging or even social media platform at all that isn't the Fediverse. Most notably, Bluesky.

FediTips, or rather the person behind it, Fedithings loves spreading plain disinformation regarding Bluesky and completely disregarding proven facts about Bluesky. Facts that are obvious by just reading one or two pages of the spec overview or the Wikipedia page on ATProto.

---

On the Fediverse, as I'm sure most of you will know, we use a sort of “message-passing” approach to sharing our posts around the network; We pass our posts directly to those which should see it, and we know who should see it because “oh hey, that guy followed me that one time!”. This is great! Everyone gets their posts no matter where they are, from completely different communities! (unless you deny them, we'll get to that)

These places, communities are often referred to as “Instances”. It's basically just the fancy term for communities though. But it's important to keep that in the back of your head for the rest of this.

Another important detail to keep in mind is how, on the Fediverse, your identity is usually tied to the community you chose. Your handle will quite literally look something like @[url=https://blog.cyrneko.eu/@/sunny@wonderful.garden]sunny@wonderful.garden[/url] (I don't think that's a real instance...I hope lol) and people will see you as being from that community

What about Bluesky? Oh boy, Completely different model.

Are there even instances?

To get this right out of the way: No. At least not how you think.

Whereas in the context of the Fediverse and all our communities we just sort of pass posts around directly, like people sending eachother letters, Bluesky went a different route

There is basically three important components:

• Personal Data Servers – This is where the posts are
• Relays – This is what gets the post from A to B
• AppViews – Fancy speak for “the app the posts are in” / “The Bluesky app”

now, Personal Data Servers sort of explain themselves. It's where your posts are. If you or anyone else wants to go right to the source of those memes and shitposts, that's where they'll find them. Right open for everyone to see.

I'll refer to Personal Data Servers as just “PDS” from here on out.

Relays then take the posts from every single PDS they can possibly find and turns them into one long, always-updating list of all posts in the order they were posted.

And the AppView has the job of, well, letting you actually see those posts and interact with them; Make new posts, like stuff, share stuff. You know the drill

---

Notice how I didn't say what data is stored on a PDS? That's actually an important detail to know, so let's compare

So with a Fediverse server, because you're passing posts directly between eachother as if they're letters, you need to hold on to the posts yourself so that you can, well...read them.

This means that you have a copy of not just your posts, but also the posts of everyone you follow and interact with regularly. Anyone that appears on the feed, basically

On Bluesky though? You don't keep the posts of others, only your own are stored. Well, your own and anyone you happen to share space with on the PDS.

What is “defederation”?

Now we're back to the whole “denying” thing that I hinted at earlier.

Due to the fact that posts are exchanged directly between people, there might be like superevilcommunity.com that does nothing but send you like hatred or something else you plain don't like. And blocking those communities is known as “defederation”

Now, this is a stark difference to how Bluesky fundamentally works.

Because everyone gets their posts from the same place, the Relay, one cannot really block the server a post comes from; You're not getting it from there anyways.

But even if they did filter out posts of that kind, there is another issue that makes it near impossible to have this sort of moderation tool.

Account Portability and Moderation

Bluesky had one arguably good reason to not use the same tech that the Fediverse uses: Fedi's account moving ability is not robust enough.

on the Fediverse, you can move your account to a different server by setting up an “alias” or “redirect”. This will make it so that anyone which follows you will automatically follow the new account, and anyone that searches for your old account will be redirected to the new one.

But for Bluesky, this wasn't enough. Posts weren't moved across, and you had to take up an entirely new identity on that new community. So for their new tech they were developing, they have a new identifier that isn't tied to a server. This is called a DID:PLC identifier.

The important thing here, just so I don't lose myself in technical details, is that even when you were previously at one given server it is trivial to move to another one, keeping this identity. Unlike a fediverse identity which is tied to the community it was on.

And this is why “defederation” doesn't work on Bluesky.

The Point

The things I've discussed here are basically a breakdown of what I talked about with Feditips.

Repeatedly, feditips refused to acknowledge the fact that Bluesky works differently, that it isn't even “federation” per-se, and eventually they pulled the “think of the minorities which are scared for their lives” card.

social.growyourown.services/@F… (archive)

On a Trans person. They were talking to a trans person. That is one of the minorities which are scared for their life.

At that point, I stopped talking to them and advised them to shut the fuck up

Feditips does this on the regular. They frequently spread disinformation about Bluesky in an effort to feed their superiority complex for using a different social media site. They blame those which use Bluesky and see them as below themselves. You can see them posting about oh how much better the fediverse is on the regular.

Preaching to the choir, on the fediverse.
my {preferred term} in christ, you don't need to preach to fediverse users how good the fediverse is. Especially when those which ACTUALLY moderate and run communities and those which have been here for MUCH LONGER THAN YOU all agree that no, the Fediverse is not this perfect safe haven. Far from it.

If you come to me screaming about how “think of the minorities” how come I don't see you taking action on transmasc erasure on fedi, or how people of color are treated on fedi? Those are marginalized too, and you say you care so much about safety which is why you redirect everyone there. Why can't they find a home here? Could it be that fedi is...not perfect? That the structure we've built over many years makes it at best uncomfortable for those people to be here?

No, it couldn't be. The fediverse is perfect and we are all superior for using it. What's that, Blacksky is a thing and they are running completely independent infrastructure for the black community? No no, you must be hallucinating. What is that, they in large parts feel much safer there? Nope. Can't be. The Fediverse is perfect.

expanding on blacksky a bit...Just to expand on this a little bit, everything I've seen from the blacksky community is genuinely amazing. They are building their community and keeping eachother safe, and it is working much better on there than anything I've seen on fedi. Seriously, these people make their own software completely independent from Bluesky PBLLC, and I've heard some rumours they even want to have their own AppView.

Thank you for reading.

---

↓ it'd mean a lot if you supported my work ↓

liberapay.com/cyrnekoko-fi.com/cyrnekoAny little bit helps ❤

---

↓ it'd mean a lot if you supported my work ↓

liberapay.com/cyrnekoko-fi.com/cyrnekoAny little bit helps ❤

Wafrn post by alexia

hey I don't wanna say anything but you are talking to that minority. Shut your mouth and do not use our fear to drive your point you prick.

^{app.wafrn.net}