Bluesky enthusiasts are stating that Bluesky has ”plans” to make ATProto universal and transfer it to W3C or the like. Well, there is no evidence that Bluesky wants to give up control or the protocol is going to be widely adopted after 5 years of development so forgive me being sceptical. The story is a bit different with ActivityPub.
The whole idea of BlueSky supporting nomadic identities but the rest of the ActivityPub (plus other stuff) Fediverse being unable to do so is such an oversold idea.
A new service using ActivityPub behind the scenes (and not the AT Protocol) can absolutely support nomadic identities, even if the service doesn't treat a whole website as the actor.
It will still use did:plc, same as AT Protocol (BlueSky), but once done so, an application that understands how to work with did:plc can dereference an actor based on the DID.
That said, an existing service will simply not be compatible with this idea, without changing how it operates.
But if #BridgyFed becomes more user-friendly, that will be a big step towards interoperability. And we can finally put this silly competition between #ActivityPub and #ATProtocol to rest.
“Blacksky is providing a platform to amplify, protect, and moderate Black content so users can safely build community online.
“The mission and purpose of the project is to de-center whiteness as the default and to provide a space for Black folk to discuss the Black everyday in a way that feels affirming.”
I just realized that #GhostCMS being compatible with #ActivityPub (and possibly #ATProtocol / #Bluesky at a later date) means that it will probably be possible to tag somebody directly in a newsletter post, via their #Mastodon or #Threads profile for instance.
Question for my web nerds— #BlueSky uses a global index "fire hose" and pull method for its #ATProtocol federation. It appears any server can create its own global index but of course, technically and effectively possible are two different things.
Does this approach disqualify BlueSky as "decentralized" social media or "federated"?
I'm trying to define the two terms but I'm finding it surprisingly difficult as I'd have to ignore lots of contradictions.
Successfully moved from mastodon.online to mastodon.social.
All that waffle in @theverge interview with Jay Graber about things such as Bluesky being better for portability, and AT Protocol being more centred around the user, and that somehow servers are bad, and... ah, I think @reckless1280 just didn't challenge her enough. I'd think what I'd much prefer is a proper panel debate, not a one-sideded AT evangelism/sales-pitch like that.
A rant about social protocols Introduction
Recently, I read an article that talked about that someone, tried to do a new platform called “Content Nation”. This is a German platform that allows people to write content (to be honest, I don’t really know what it does.) and publish it. And recently, the creators tried to implement the ActivityPub protocol. They did so by using the official documentation provided by @w3c.
The problem was that the last time the official documentation was updated, was in 23 January 2018. So, this means that a lot of new standards that other platforms like Mastodon, Misskey, etc... use are not written in there. But this isn’t the fault of the service developers, this is the fault of the W3C that hasn’t been an update to the protocol officially to support the new standards in the industry such as Webfinger, SharedInbox, Privacy Scopes, and Opt-Out for Search…
The thing, is that this led to a lot of people thinking that this site was some kind of scraper and started making the crawler crash or, even worse, someone tried to load CP inside the platform. BlueSky
Recently, BlueSky opened its AT protocol for everyone to use and federate, due to this, there has been a bit of a discussion inside these platforms. This made me think, why did BlueSky feel the necessity to make another protocol? If there is one already, why do we need another one that competes, wasn’t the objective of protocols to allow interoperability?
So, I did a bit of digging and I found two things. The first one is that they wanted so solve a few things that AP does not support officially (here are the main points, not all of them):
Account portability. A person’s online identity should not be owned by corporations with no accountability to their users. With the AT Protocol, you can move your account from one provider to another without losing any of your data or social graph.
Algorithmic choice. Algorithms dictate what we see and who we can reach. We must have control over our algorithms if we're going to trust in our online spaces. The AT Protocol includes an open algorithms mode so users have more control over their experience.
A lot of these problems are already present on ActivityPub for a long time. The account portability of ActivityPub let’s say it’s not intuitive. You have to do a lot of things and even then, there are some things like the posts that you make or the favourites that don’t transfer (in the case of favourites you need to transfer them manually, the same for blocks and mutes).
Also, right now 99% if not all software that uses ActivityPub, does not have an algorithm that orders content for you to see, but shows you everything in chronological order (I don’t know if its intentional or if it’s a limit of AP) and the only thing you have to discover topics is trough hashtags that maybe someone forgot to tag.
Furthermore, not to mention that on ActivityPub, you are at the mercy of the server moderators, so this means that if you know someone that is on an instance that is blocked by yours, you won’t be able to talk to them unless you change the instance, which in a way it’s not very decentralized. The other protocols
By doing research, I realized that there are a lot of other protocols (for example Nostr) that have its own implementation of things maybe there are some that are bridged and other not.
Such protocols have different features, for example Nostr allows you to suggest content edit to other people’s posts, move your content easily, etc. How can we solve this?
First, we have to know why all these other companies make their own. I must say, that most of them probably do because AP does not allow customization of posts or the adding of new features for everyone and the fact that it’s not been updated for 6 whole years makes matters worse.
What the developers want, is a protocol that lets them create wherever they want and add everything the want, for example the edit thing that I said the Nostr supports, the only way to add it to AP, would be or only on your software or find another software that is willing to implement that feature, the rest of the market is left behind as well as the users that depending on what it is, they don’t understand.
My solution to this problem would be to add some kind of per user plugin system directly to the AP that allows for devs to implement add-ons that do with the JSON strings that add buttons or scripts at least to send and receive data. As well as to add some kind of CSS support for the posts and profiles. Of course, the point of these is that if you make a platform, and you are the only one using these characteristics, well… but in case that everybody wants to use it and everybody makes their own plugins it would be chaos.
For this, the solution I proposed would be like something you add while the W3C updates the protocol to support a very popular feature. #socialprotocols#nostr#activitypub#W3C#ATprotocol#rant#blogpost#ContentNation
Great interview with Jay Graber (CEO, #Bluesky) on Decoder with Nilay Patel (@reckless1280), where they dig into some of the major difference between Bluesky (#ATProtocol) and #Mastodon (#ActivityPub).
My read on #bluesky is that they are effectively sucking the air out of the decentralization balloon, whether they intend to or not. On the tech side, the #ATprotocol will prevent much decentralization from ever happening and divert the focus that was on #ActivityPub development. On the culture side, they deter a critical mass from developing here, which we need to overwhelm the influence of our most annoying users and lure in the people most people want to follow and interact with. #fediverse
Manton from Micro.blog intends to enable the service as an ATProtocol PDS:
The long-term plan for Micro.blog is to fully support AT’s PDS — Personal Data Servers. Any blog hosted on Micro.blog would plug into Bluesky seamlessly, with data portable to other AT Protocol hosting providers.
A major difference between the #ActivityPub federation and the #BlueSky#Atproto (#Atprotocol) federation is that under AcitivityPub, used by Mastodon, all servers that need to send or receive data from other servers need to make direct connections to each other. This means many queued jobs and many connections, maybe thousands. This leads to the classic sidekiq queue problems when Mastodon instances have numerous users with numerous follows, and relays.
In contrast, in atproto, the user's PDS, Personal Data Server, doing equivalent work of a Mastodon server, for example, only makes a few connections to the relay server's fire hose to deliver and pick up messages. It never connects to any other PDS directly. Theoretically, a tiny #PDS on atproto can handle a considerable number of users. This seems to be an advantage.
Mastodon admins spend a lot of time and money fighting performance issues, database connection counts, and sidekiq queues because the server has to talk directly to other servers. But the PDS only needs to talk to maybe one, or possibly a few relays to get and send messages.
Here's a diagram of the atproto architecture. It appears quite a simple architecture.
Come alcuni sapranno, non me n’è mai fregato granché di #Bluesky, o del suo #ATProtocol… fino a prima di oggi. Perché si, con anche tutta la tecnologia open-source alla base osservabile e utilizzabile da chiunque, sarebbe stato l’ennesimo esercizio di costruzione di una rete centralizzata, che nell’anno del signore 2024 proprio no, se anche non esistesse ActivityPub, preferirei comunque i blog #selfhosted. 🗾️
Tuttavia, #notizia di ieri, è partito un #esperimento di federazione per chiunque voglia provare a self-hostare il #software necessario. Tutto un po’ strano, è una #federazione in qualche modo condizionata, che dipende dal #server centrale e ha dei limiti artificiali, ma è un inizio verso qualcosa di #interessante. Almeno, avendo letto anche l’articolo di blog non-tecnico, questa è la mia impressione, e per la potenzialità di espandere il mio regno del terrore su nuove sponde quasi quasi ci provo. 😈️
Perché — premettendo il fatto che non ho dati oggettivi per dire questa cosa (dovrei raccoglierne e analizzarli, ma questo non è un campo dove sono esperta, quindi mi trovo in difficoltà) — la mia esperienza sul #Fediverso mi suggerisce che aprire la propria #istanza personale (come questo stesso sito, ma penso anche a quando avevo il mio Misskey) significa cadere nella totale irrilevanza, in confronto allo stabilirsi in quelle bene o male grosse. Con #ATProto il focus vuole essere sempre e comunque la connessione ad una sola #comunità globale, quindi la #decentralizzazione per singole persone può non costituire alcun aspetto negativo per la propria discoverability, le proprie note dovrebbero poter essere cagate da qualcuno e non perse nel fiume di #Internet… 😇️
#Bluesky introduces distinct features in federated social networking, diverging from Mastodon's model.
Key differences include global conversation access regardless of server, composable moderation tools, over 40,000 algorithmic feeds for a tailored timeline, and seamless account portability. These innovations aim to enhance user experience and engagement across the network. https://bsky.social/about/blog/02-22-2024-open-social-web#pds
As of Feb 2024, the AT Protocol's federation capabilities have expanded for self-hosters, including federated domain handles, feed generators, relays, app views, and PDS hosting. Work continues on federated moderation and extending federation to large service providers. #ATProtocol#FederationUpdate https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds?tab=readme-ov-file
In the long term, #atprotocol seems to me to be the better concept, even if #Bluesky's business model is not yet clear (so we'll talk about it again in a year's time). #Activitypub needs to follow suit and separate data pods from the #Mastodon servers to make moving to another instance easier than it is now (maybe like this https://activitypods.org).
What do you think? 🤔
ICYMI — you can now listen to my interview with Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on Spotify or wherever else fine podcasts are traded.
We go pretty deep contrasting #ATProtocol and #ActivityPub, discuss challenges with "creator mobility" and touch on opportunities to serve the decentralized social web.
How is this very post licensed and how would you know? Do #Mastodon instances dictate a #license on users posts? Is there a way for me, the #author, to assign one and pass the information through the #fediverse? Do I give away my #copyright in the moment, I press on "Publish!" below? (Or press C-c C-c in #Emacs#mastodonEl?) Can I limit #distribution e.g. to notforprofit entities? (Not that I wanted to. At least not now.)
A great breakdown of Bridgy Fed and the whole situation. I personally am excited for the project, as there are people I want to follow on #Bluesky and I also want them to be able to follow me, without me having to manage two accounts.
I hope you don't let people harrass you @snarfed.org@snarfed.org You're doing some really interesting work! (You also seem to be taking vitriol and feedback very well!) Good luck!
He wrote a great article back in January entitled “Moderate people, not code” that is good background
> “Whether ActivityPub or ATProto or webmention, the underlying technical protocol a community uses to interact online is a poor way to judge who they are and whether you might like them.”