could someone please explain bluesky to me (the protocol used by the mastodon network)???

@cwebber It's like, when you go outside and the sun beams messages straight into your brain. Except there is only one sun and it is owned by corporations, just like in the real world.

@cwebber 😄

@cwebber it’s kind of like email, but for social media

@cwebber

Well, first of all, you need a pigeon who is from some place near the recipient's house. You take your tweet and attach it to the bird's leg and let it go, and it flies across the blue sky towards home, where it knows it can find food. There it joins its home feed and the message is received.

Be sure to trade a few pigeons with your friends whenever you go calling, so you can keep using the blue sky protocol.

@cwebber I think it works by bouncing signals from your computer off of the atmosphere (hence the name "blue sky" it can only work well in clear weather). If it's cloudy it instead saves your messages in the clouds until the weather becomes clear, that's why we call it cloud storage.

@cwebber so first you need at least 3 teapots in series

@bremner @cwebber

The sun is owned by corporations? Then I think the climate crisis is over, We can just pester them into turning the sun down a bit ...

@cwebber oh dear.. `w;7[)

@cwebber 😆

@cwebber telling my husband “Christine is at it again” — does he know who you are? Not really but he knows this one thing

@celesteh @cwebber RFC 2549: IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service

@cwebber talked about it already, bluesky chat is just like email, but centralized

@noisytoot @cwebber Famously powering the AT-ATs and AT-STs used by the Dominion in Battlestar Galactica

@noisytoot @cwebber oh, and decentralization is about making sure you can't disrupt federation by posting +++ATH0, now I understand

@noisytoot @cwebber idk why this is so funny to me

@cwebber well, when a personal data server, an activitypub actor, and a JSON document love each other very much, sometimes they form a polycule

@cwebber I think you have it backwards...

Mastodon is the protocol (specifically, it's a decentralized blockchain protocol), and Bluesky is just a Layer-2 dApp built on top of it. The underlying tech you're trying to reference is ATProto, which actually stands for Asynchronous Token Protocol.

It’s honestly a pretty elegant stack if you actually understand distributed systems, but I get why someone would be confused by the nomenclature.

To really wrap your head around this, you need to stop thinking about it like a social network and start thinking about it as a fungible data layer.

@cwebber The bluesky is due to Rayleigh scattering. As sunlight enters Earth's atmosphere, it collides with gas molecules that scatter shorter wavelengths (blue and violet) in all directions more than longer wavelengths (red and yellow). Although violet scatters most, the sky appears blue because the Sun emits less violet light and human eyes are more sensitive to blue.

When the light scatters, it federates social media posts.

@grace @cwebber when is the next airdrop

@noisytoot oh well played. @cwebber

@cwebber It's all explained in Schoolhouse Rock, where the Federal Government turns a Bill into a Law that forbids you to defederate from me no matter what.

@celesteh @cwebber ah, that makes sense. And if the bird fails to make it to the proper destination because it stumbles or tumbles, those posts end up on Tumblr, right?

@cwebber oh yeah there's a nice infographic for this

@OrcRys yes, that is actually a thing @celesteh @cwebber

@josgeluk @celesteh @cwebber Indeed, it is an amendment for RFC 1149, "A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers"

@OrcRys @josgeluk @cwebber

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers

@grace @cwebber naturally it's all written in Rust

@cwebber

@cwebber

yeah its super simple:

centralised AI that cost 3 euros to run

@grace @cwebber Everything is so fungible. OMG, the fungibility!

@cwebber Bluesky in morning, poster take warning. Bluesky at night, poster's delight

@cwebber I heard it was built using this cool new thing called Goblins from Spritely (https://spritely.institute/) which has some cool ocap stuff so your posts are only visible to people you want to see them and lets you edit your posts atomicly so no one ever sees an old copy on the network!

It was built by Nistrine Wemmer-Lebber who's quite a hoopy frood and I hear she's often available to answer questions about the deep lore of its structure.

@grace @cwebber I admire your nerve.

@cwebber +1

@cwebber common misconception. While Blues Ky does maintain the cosmic harmony of the fedi, this is largely through transcendent soulful guitar and cosmic goddess energy and similar ineffables. Her protocol work is in an unrelated field.

@cwebber @grace damn this whole time I thought it was Adenosine Triphosphate Protocol

@cwebber First of all it's called bluesky/.social, sometimes referred to as bluesky + .social. Bluesky is the protocol but it utilizes the .social core utils.

It is decentralised btw, which means everyone has to develop their own application that communicates over the bluesky protocol. This ensures that only real pros can use it, not noobs like women.

/s

@grace @cwebber
Is that the same layer as OSCAR?

@cwebber Have you ever seen a big pile of horse-pucky? It’s like that but with computers.

@cwebber

Honestly, it confuses me. Like, OK, it uses HTML packets as its proof-of-state protocol for endpoint authentication, sure, but then how do they ensure the integrity of the routing tables if all the network switches are decentralized and the JSON decryption is entirely piecewise? That is not what Mersenne primes are for!! I need somebody to explain it to my like I'm 5.

@cwebber

I did fall for those questions once 😂

@cwebber mastodon is not a network, it is actually a heavy metal band from Atlanta, and while I assume they did play under blue skies sometimes, I fail to see the relevance here

@cwebber

BlueSky and Mastodon are the same thing. In fact, "BlueSky" is an anagram of "Mastodon". It's a little in-joke of Eugen's that no one has noticed yet, so don't tell anyone I told you.

It's an odd quirk of the English language that "Mastodon" is also an anagram of "Elephant" but "BlueSky", obviously, is not.

@cwebber It's a fork of Matrix - originally it was meant to be a Matrix port of Secure Scuttlebutt but it got derailed by a project to port to Typescript, then Dart, then Maleboge.

It got dropped by the Matrix devs, picked up by Apache, then warehoused and forked by Jack Dorsey as a forever-beta fig-leaf against EU-mandated social media interop.

These says it's the subject of occasional academic papers but not in use for Matrix anymore. Jack has a code golf bounty out on it: sub-500 SLOC.

@grace @cwebber Meanwhile, some poor neural net training run is having a stroke trying to reconcile why Christine boosted this message with the content of this message.

@ben @cwebber
oh man, i love iceberg diagrams

@cwebber it actually just looks blue because light is refracted between many servers between its original source and where you perceive it

@noisytoot @agturcz @cwebber

That explains why userid starts with the "at" symbol.

@cwebber fast moving air moving over the curved surfaces of packets causes a pressure differential that leads to lift, enabling global post transmission and giving the platform its name

@cwebber It's like blacksky, except with extra corporate toxic-positivity flavouring.

@cwebber Well, you see, normally web sites are hosted in the cloud. But on a sunny day, there is only blue sky and no clouds. And yet, people insist on being able to surf their blasted web sites at a moment's notice.

@hrw @noisytoot @cwebber We need to start making notes about the alternative fedi lore 😁

@cwebber it's what we're all using right now, silly.

The name was chosen based on old myths about how the sky was blue. A bit far fetched I know. Give me one of our arid yellow days, thick with smokey flavor!