@fediversereport Thank you for sharing. It is exciting to see what is happening! I think your point at the end is really worth considering: is #Bluesky and the #ATProto interested in multiple apps or is it merely a vehicle for microblogging? I don't have technical background, but I suspect that the decentralization for BSKY is more for show than practice. Critique #ActivityPub all we like but I do think the commitment to platform diversity is there and is practiced.
Both Rachel and Peter suggest that some moderation functionality could/should become part of the protocol stack. #AtProto does composable moderation and that is really cool. Peter hopes that #ActivityPub may learn from it and evolve in this direction.
Former CEO of Twitter wanted to build a social protocol no-one can control, like SMTP or HTTP for social media. Bluesky’s ATProto was supposed to be an open source protocol that Twitter could eventually utilize, but then Musk happened and Bluesky started taking it to the wrong direction and everything fell apart in Dorsey’s mind.
A very revealing interview. I now see even more future in W3C’s ActivityPub.
An important distinction is slowly being uncovered about the definition of the term "fediverse." Who is it that gets to decide what this place is? How are we being represented? These are not easy questions to answer and if we don't do a better job describing ourselves, then the job will get done for us by people who don't understand the underlying values we hold. #fediverse#meta#threads
@liaizon Personally, and the way the term was used, since it was first coined, was any software with #OStatus support (later #ActivityPub).
When there were discussions of having a new name, I ran suggestion threads and polls about it, and one suggestion/choice was mycelial, mycelium. I like it so I started using it myself.
I've seen #ATProto get flak for how the design folds up into relays, but really that architecture has so much to commend it over the way that we're doing it in #ActivityPub today.
It has some notable disadvantages for what people are generally looking for here as well, sure, absolutely. Just let's not all pretend that what it is doing isn't valuable or that the tradeoffs don't make sense.
We see the consequences of AP's design choices in this space every day, but that doesn't make them better.
There's this phenomena of normalizing the thing that you deal with every day. We treat the flaws in AP as "less severe" because we've either already found ways around them (good or bad ways being another discussion) or because we normalize that pain.
In reality: very few engineering decisions are absolute one way or another.
Instead, we need to talk tradeoffs and also talk about what we want out of #ATproto that is hard to achieve in #ActivityPub and see if we can find ways to get there.
The paper figure is a lot cuter, but by linearizing it and presenting it as two parallel tracks they have obscured the most salient feature of the network: the big relay in the middle. Beyond "centralization bad," that pins down most of the undesirable and dangerous features of the protocol, and makes it seem like theres a lot more choice than there is.
Since the design purposefully hides the architecture: you dont know where your feed generators are drawing from, or those used by your friends. So you cant know what the effect of choosing a different relay would be, aka the main relay is always indispensable. Importantly the relays subscribe to you, you dont push to the relay, and since you arent really supposed to operate your own data store, you can be dropped from the network without knowing - the relay serves as an unaccountable point of moderation.
Its this part for me that tells the whole story: #atproto was designed for a new kind of advertising market, and when their VC money and puttering domain registration revenue streams dry up, control over the main firehose relay is a big gaping profit vector waiting to be capitalized on.
Serious question. Is it a complicated process to get the desktop emoji picker to play nice with dark mode? It seems Mastodon and Bluesky both have this problem
Same thing for me… I should be hanging out here, where most of the #iOSDev moved. Instead, I'm spending most time on #Bluesky, the #ATProto devs Discord and hacking on various tools for the API, and I try to drag people there one by one.
Not sure exactly what it is that's pulling me there… Some combination of UI/UX, tech architecture, some unspecified "vibe", and the feeling of being a part of something new that's only starting to be built, a "greenfield project".
So I know I am probably going to get biased responses, but please try and be a bit objective. What makes you prefer posting on the #Fediverse over #ATProto / #Bluesky ? I really wanna pick people’s brains on this. I will go first:
I like the concept of portable identity that Bsky talks about however it still feels very much the same exact thing as running your own instance on #ActivityPub but worse as you mainly going to be on PDS that connects to the central BGS that Bluesky operates so you can interact with others, but now they have the power to just block you from everyone else on the BGS… with #ActivityPub you are not having to speak to a centralized BGS you are sending to anything that requests to receive your feed similar to RSS… and you can block still if you don’t want to see stuff from another instance as your instance or personal level without effecting other instances or people depending on the level you block it at.
I've been tracking how the number of posts per day on #Bluesky is going - looks like it's now at about ~400k posts per day from 70-75k users, which is around 4-5x what it was when I started recording data 2 months ago 📈 #ATProto#ATProtocol
(*) I think it's mostly furries though because my people aren't posting much 🙃
This video from @jgarr about the differences between #ActivityPub and #ATProto has me wondering if ActivityPub could actually support separating identity from content, since things like post ids are fully qualified URLs.
Could I host my identity on one domain and my content on another? I haven’t found anything in the protocol spec that forbids that, but I may have overlooked it.
Actively pushing against others to adopt your protocol is how you ensure that your protocol won't "win." I'm a firm believer that a decentralized protocol will be the future of social networks/feeds as we know them. I don't know if it is going to be #ActivityPub or #ATProto or something else. But I believe a decentralized protocol will be the future. But the winner will be the one that centralized-acting services adopt. That's a good thing for everyone. It means users have data portability. 🧵
I bring impressions and takes from 12 hours occasionally glancing at #bluesky social and reading about the tech
The #federation concept and approach to personal data / profile portability and security is neat. I’ll be interested to see how that progresses in practice over the next months and year, and how much cross pollination there ends up being between #fedi / #activitypub and #bsky / #atproto
And then, unfortunately, at the moment there’s an.. oddly designed feature that enables some people to be total sleezeballs and rack up thousands / 10s of thousands of follows (yes! I saw an account with >40k follows!), in what I can only guess is a vain attempt at creating an influence-y social fiefdom early in the vacuum with few heavy hitters. I find it really distasteful and don’t plan on touching bsky until there’s a mitigation.
Call me a romantic, but I like to feel like I’m in a small community and sorta get to “know” the people following me? And have others discover me organically?
Ah, I love arguing about #ATProto with people who prefer ActivityPub/fediverse and know very little about ATProto, but have strong opinions about it… 🙃