I went to the event 'Bluesky mini meetup in Kyoto 2024' where I could ask the Bluesky development team, 'Can the server withstand a sudden increase in users?' and 'Are there plans to add a trend display function?'
I attended the offline event ' Bluesky mini meetup in Kyoto 2024 ' held on Saturday, September 21, 2024, where I could hear from
Bluesky
https://bsky.app/
◆The venue looks like this
Bluesky mini meetup in Kyoto 2024 was held at Doro Shobo , a bookstore and event space in Nakagyo Ward, Kyoto City.
It's a few minutes walk from Karasuma Station to Doro Shobo.
The inside of the venue looked like this. More than 10 Bluesky users were gathered.
The following person is Mr. Abramov, a member of the Bluesky development team who visited Japan this time. Mr. Abramov is in charge of front-end development at Bluesky, and is also known as a member of the development team for the UI building JavaScript library '
Mr. Abramov's speech
The event started with a speech by Mr. Abramov, who gave a detailed explanation of the data management system of the decentralized SNS protocol '
Abramov's lecture was given entirely in English, and the venue had a Mac with a large screen display of the AI translation app VoicePing .
◆Question and Answer Session
After the lecture, there was a Q&A session. First, Abramov answered questions prepared by
Nighthaven (hereinafter, Nighthaven):
What are your impressions of Bluesky's front-end development team members, Paul Frazee , Hailey , Eric , and Samuel ?
Mr. Abramov (hereinafter, Abramov):
Paul is a great developer. He built the initial version of the Bluesky app in a few months. His code is not perfect and sometimes requires hacks, but he is very good at prioritizing what is important. Hailey is a great problem solver. She is working on the video playback feature for the Android and iOS apps and is good at dealing with platform differences.
Eric is in charge of the visual aspects of the app. He has a great sense of aesthetics and knows how to make the UI look beautiful. Samuel developed the video generation feature for the web app. He is familiar with WebAPIs and is good at thinking about native approaches.
Nighthaven:
Are there plans to include group chat functionality in Bluesky?
Abramov:
Plans exist, but there are no immediate plans to implement them.
Nighthaven:
Are there plans to implement a trend display function?
Abramov:
We have received many requests for a trend display feature and are considering it. There is some initial movement, but we are not sure when it will be implemented.
Nighthaven:
Has adopting a decentralized SNS protocol had any impact on your front-end development?
Abramov:
Front-end development is not much different from regular web development.
Nighthaven:
What does Bluesky look like in two years?
Abramov:
I hope it's still alive (laughs). Yes. We need to secure a clear means of monetization to keep the company afloat. We also want to implement features that are highly requested by users, such as 'implementing group chat functionality' and 'muting specific users.' Also, since Bluesky has a strong impression of being for power users, we need to make it easy for general users to use. We also want to strengthen Bluesky's unique features that are not available on other SNS, such as the feed function.
After Nighthaven's questions, the event participants were given the opportunity to ask Abramov questions. It was a good opportunity, so I asked four questions that I had in mind. The questions and answers are as follows:
GIGAZINE (hereinafter, G):
When Bluesky's technical advisor, Why (Jeromy Johnson),
Abramov:
I used to work on React at Facebook (now Meta). I had been there for 8 years, but I wanted to do something else, so I decided to quit. That's when I came across Bluesky and was really interested in it.
I really loved Twitter, but I had a hard time understanding their new direction, so I thought it would be nice to have a 'different version of Twitter.' I also loved open source, and I wanted to work in that field.
Bluesky was made with React, and I liked the idea of Bluesky's ' treating a domain as a handle name .' Bluesky seemed to make sense in its fundamental parts, so I interviewed for a job and joined the development team.
G:
When Why visited Japan, he told me that ' Bluesky's data centers are in San Francisco and Brasilia. Each data center operates 30 servers.' The number of Bluesky users has increased dramatically in the past month, but do you have enough servers?
Abramov:
Yes. Since X service was down in Brazil , many Brazilian users joined Bluesky . We currently have over 10 million users. Before X service was down, we must have had around 6 million. Right after the users started to increase rapidly, the server became a little unstable. This was not because the server resources were insufficient, but because some of the settings were not perfect. So we had to adjust the server configuration a little.
After adjusting the server configuration, it's running much smoother and we can handle a lot more traffic than before. Brazilian users are very active, with a lot of posts, a lot of follows, and a lot of likes. In particular, I think the number of likes has increased by about 10 times. However, the network has been resilient so far and has been able to scale, so we can easily handle a larger user base.
G:
The AT Protocol explanation page introduces three main federation architectures: 'PDS' where each user's data is stored, 'Relay' which collects information from each PDS and performs curation, and 'App Views' which receives information from Relay and processes it for display. For now, it has been announced that users can host PDS servers, but are there plans to allow users to self-host Relay servers as well?
Abramov:
Using Relay is open source and public, so if you want to do it, you can. We're not stopping you.
When you run a Relay, you can target all PDSs on your network, or just some of them. By the way, if you host a PDS server for all PDSs, it will cost about $150 (about 22,000 yen) per month. It's not super expensive, but it's more expensive than hosting a PDS.
Bluesky hosts two relay servers for load balancing.
G:
Are there plans to implement private accounts? And what is the priority for private accounts?
Abramov:
This is an interesting question. To implement private accounts, we need to solve several problems. Decentralized SNS protocols are characterized by being entirely public, but we are focusing on whether we can create a 'decentralized public SNS'. There are also several considerations regarding the behavior of the API for private accounts. We will be finalizing the specifications over the next few months to half a year.
However, we are not trying to implement a private account (like other SNS). We are trying to create a system where data is stored in PDS, not published to Relay, and published only to specific apps that require access to the data. For example, it is like Dropbox file sharing. This is different from the so-called 'private account' and is more like a group chat function.
We are currently considering the specifications for private accounts, so it is not yet clear what they will entail, but we would like to at least provide something that can accommodate use cases where people want a private account.
◆ Lightning talks by users
After Mr. Abramov's speech and the Q&A session, Shigepon and Eltan gave lightning talks, after which the event was dismissed. The contents of the lightning talks can be viewed from the embedded link below.
Today's slides #BlueskyMeetupKyoto
—Shigepon @shigepon7 (@shigepon.net) 2024-09-21T07:07:24.114Z
docs.google.com/presentation...
I don't know how much of the broadcast was on, but I'll throw out the presentation materials #bskymeetup
— Eltan (@l-tan.dolciss.net) 2024-09-21T07:01:23.311Z
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/11FDxvMWTDQfeQYsJqIAYLHoxdbBcksR6eRRrtok5vIw/edit?usp=drivesdk
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