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Someone Made a Dataset of One Million Bluesky Posts for 'Machine Learning Research'
(www.404media.co)
this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2024
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I don't know why anyone would be surprised about this. Bluesky is a distributed system using an open protocol. The whole point of it is that there's no central control.
Same goes for the Fediverse, of course. Everybody should be prepared for the "surprise" that all our posts and comments here are also being used for AI training purposes.
It's not distributed, nor really designed at all like the fediverse. It is deeply centralized, and its architecture requires it to be centralized, or at least to have only huge players with a "gods eye view" for it to work.
Atproto was initially designed as a straight drop in replacement for twitter, so its design makes sense, but its not at all like the Fediverse.
One of the authorities of ActivityPub, the fediverse protocol, just did a very kind but still very blunt breakdown of Bluesky's design choices. she is a big fan of the people involved and some of its positives, but it is not fediverse like, not at all. In her words, it doesn't scale down, only up. You cant have a small bluesky server. To work, you need all data sent to everyone, on every instance. The data demands for just the current influx is TBs/month of data, and climbing (according to the link below, they use 16TB of nvme storage right now after the recent surge, which would be thousands /month on any cloud service. This will climb dramatically).
All data being public is a design choice by Bluesky. It is also a different design choice by the fediverse that comes to the same outcome, but that does have an answer if we want it. I know gotosocial did something interesting to make fully private votes by using a empty shell profile that votes, but tying that in a tricky way to your account. So there are fediverse answers to privacy, but there may not be bluesky answers.
EDIT: One of the blueksy/atproto devs replied to the above link today. The gist reinforces the point that the service is intended to be run by large orgs, including corporations, but also big non profits like the internet archive or Wikipedia. His take is that user experience is key, and for that you need big money and easy features. They are hoping that since the pieces of atproto can be hosted separately by separate giant orgs, that market forces will make it viable to be decentralized.
From what I understand of the protocol, the federation just isn’t the same but provides some of the same benefits. Im not an expert, correct if wrong.
Essentially when I looked into it, the main benefits are stuff I actually prefer as opposed to the current implementation on fediverse in some regards.
The main idea being that users own their data on their own server (or collective server) and can choose to remove or take that data elsewhere to different apps or potentially even accounts. This is a lacking feature in the fediverse and it’s a common contention. If I get blocked on Lemmy or Mastodon, my data goes away. Especially since most people are not likely to host an instance themselves (since it’s an awful user experience) whereas BlueSky data can easily be stored by a third party that is trusted.
But yes you’re right, this still promotes large platforms. However again it gives users more control over what they host on which platforms and keeps their data in one place. That’s a huge advantage imo.
I don’t so much mind this future. It’s not quite the free speech platform that the fediverse is but it’s closer. Moderation can be much more lax and focus on TOS breaking or illegal things. And hey if at some point BlueSky is too woke or whatever the hell people say, they can literally pick up their server with their content and build an app elsewhere. The implementation is different but the end point is largely the same which is cool.
Im not an expert either, but both people in the above links are. They are both worth reading if you want to understand the platforms better.
As to blueskys user data portability, it's part of the protocol to a degree, but it's not a reality. The design is such that only megacorps/giant orgs can host the bluesky service. It doesnt really matter if your data is portable if no one will let you import it. Its akin to google reader and rss. People could export their rss feeds when google shut down google reader, but without an rss reader, it didn't matter. That data had no usable context.
These is a drastic asymmetry problem with bluesky. It demands a giant player to gatekeep, whereas the fediverse lets anyone, anywhere add or even begin a network.
The Fediverse doesnt have a parallel of data portability at all, so even that lackluster implementation is something, but to both protocols defense, the Fediverse is talking about changes to activelypub to add this, and bluesky is attempting to make small services more possible.
Still, in all reality, neither of these platforms offers anything like that today, or likely in the near future.
And much like a big RSS reader shutting down, being able to have the core data in a documented format that can be worked with makes it far easier for the community to build the tools they need to work with it and extract things they need from that blob of data.
You might not be able to easily jump to another social media platform, but you still have access to all your posts and history, and that has a lot of inherent value either way.
Maybe. An rss reader is a very basic service with an easy way to rebuild, but killing google reader still led in part to the death of rss as a viable platform. Its barely in use anymore as a protocol, even though there are plenty of options to run now. Bluesky is a wildly more difficult and expensive tool to reanimate and compete with than rss, so it might be even deader if they ever give up.
Having data in a dead format isn't valuable. It's like having 100 laserdiscs and no player. They don't do anything but look shiny. That has some value, but it doesn't do what it is supposed to.
The data absolutely is valuable.
Having your content means having your content.
Is it? Data without an application that can use it is not useful, almost by definition.
You suddenly have a movage problem.
If the format is clearly defined, that's literally all that matters for data to be useful. In the event they shut down, it only takes a single solo developer to make it trivial to browse your content.
Physical data is difficult to preserve. Digital in open, clearly defined formats is not.
Looks like we talking about different things. You just want a list of all your comments? To what end? Note taking? Nostalgia?
I'm talking about a social media account without a social media network. All you can do is format shift the data to have a record. You cant use it for what it was designed for in the bluesky framework.
Yes, your content. That's the only thing anyone ever claimed you keep and the only part that would make any sense to have value. It makes it incredibly simple to make that history available elsewhere, and it's incredibly likely that a future platform that emerges will facilitate that process, just like all the book platforms let you import from goodreads.
Its not incredibly likely you can import social media from one network to another.
It has never been supported by any social media network, and bluesky's architecture is such that the only people that can host it are giant orgs like mega corps, who are profit driven and who want lockin, not portability.
You're hoping it works out, but without an example of viability, it's just conjecture that this is a real or even valuable feature.
It's a virtual certainty, because you control the information.
The lack of imports has nothing to do with the new places not wanting it and everything to do with the old place holding your data hostage. Having a clean, formally defined source of your data is all it takes to make building an import from a popular network trivial.