Notes from Ahoy IndieSky Europe
A summary of the IndieSky Ahoy event, running a EuroStack, and joining the IndieSky working group for independent ATProto infrastructure.
After a high energy day at the first Ahoy conference in Hamburg, Germany, we hosted a day of discussions about IndieSky: running independent ATProtocol infrastructure.
The morning was spent on introductions and and an overview of the different parts of the composable ATProto architecture.
For the afternoon, we dug into what it would take to run an entire stack hosted in Europe, and what people in the room needed from it.
You can read the full notes from the day on the ATProto Wiki »
IndieSky PDS Hosting
Laurens @laurenshof.online captured a list of questions for PDS Hosting to be reviewed as part of IndieSky.
There were various other ideas here about how to grow PDS hosting. Right now there are around 2000 independent servers (Kuba's list, not realtime – Spark has already hit the 200 account soft limit), with most being individual / small group servers. PDS hosting already delivers data sovereignty today, so the question becomes what types of reasons and organizations would grow independent accounts.
Community PDS Hosting: NorthSky's immediate concern is "user safety for 2SLGBTQIA+ communities", with PDS hosting in Canadian jurisdiction as a first step. They will also soon be releasing a graphical PDS migration tool which is exactly the sort of thing needed to give people the peace of mind to move.
App linked PDS onboarding: Sebastian @seabass.bsky.social from Skeets/Bluescreen/Flashes would like to offer PDS hosting, but as a single dev is concerned about moderation needs to comply with German / EU regulations – especially for non-bsky Lexicons. Spark is running a PDS plus relay plus video CDN and will be one of the first to have large numbers of accounts.
Academic Institution hosting: There were a number of participants from European universities, who were concerned about the preservation of global science communication. Should they host a relay? What would they tell their IT team? Was a relay needed?
What if we challenged every university in the world to host a PDS to support data sovereign, open social scientific discussion?
There is also rising interest in other Lexicons supporting uploads of academic papers, Digital Object Identifier support (DOI), and other academic / science focused features, but all that can come after data sovereignty. See Cosmik Network for one in-progress app in this space.
A Full EuroStack
We talked through all of the components of a full stack, that could be run in Europe as commons infrastructure.
The goal is not necessarily to "clone the Bluesky stack", but rather determine which parts are useful to share and power European services, as well as developing new services, apps, and clients by European entrepreneurs.
Relay: cheap and easy to run with a 24-72 hour window of content available. What needs to be scanned or removed at this layer? Indigo and/or Ozone involved. Coordinate with Bsky PBC and other operators on bad actor / spam removal aka PDS Ban List.
Archive / Headless Appview: for longer than the 72 hour window, running a system that provides a number of different services. Historical search, distributed backup (copy of user repos), API endpoints for aggregated queries. Free access to information, aggregated in Europe.
@redsolver.dev who runs SkyFeed hosted a talk on Thursday about an approach to very low cost archiving and queries. Running a Constellation instance as well would fit in this category.
Moderation: small scale personal PDS or private relays may be able to be run with no, or minimal moderation tooling, but the intent is to run independent commons infrastructure at scale. Hosting an Ozone instance, and then perhaps an entity that runs "European Moderation" that can be shared amongst the relay and many PDS hosts? Configuring automod rules, talking to Roost Tools for what they're working on. Big question was about moderation for custom lexicons.
Open Questions and Next Steps
We were at the end of two full days of all ATProto talk all the time and felt like we got through a lot. Laurens' very direct list of PDS questions feel manageable, and we had multiple people in the room (like Redsolver) who already had major infrastructure that could be hosted in Europe.
Here are some of the open questions and tasks:
- Clearer communication on how to request an increase of PDS accounts per host from the Bluesky team
- Reach out to Roost Tools for moderation support
- What are the details for using an Ozone instance to manage multiple PDS instances? And, does Ozone hook into Relay for PDS banning / bad actor?
- Make a list of friendly Euro cloud host
- Who can we go to with jurisdiction-level policy questions about what this stack would require?
- Gather information about non-bluesky lexicon moderation / what it will take to modify Ozone to support this
- What kind of entity do we need and when? e.g. maybe we can start with OpenCollective Europe to begin with to pool funds for infrastructure costs?
The next steps are to go through the info we've gathered and start answering more questions, and gather together people who actively want to work on it.
We have a first online working group meeting planned for Thursday, May 8th to recap this event, gather others that want to work together, and further plan working group coordination.
Full raw notes are available on the ATProto Wiki, and we can jointly flesh out other areas like a list of all of the PDS implementations.
