I recently had a discussion with a friend on Bluesky who knows more about the inner workings of the platform, and it pretty much solidified what I already thought was going on behind the scenes with ATproto, which seems to be a lot more complex than the system behind AP, however it did seem to improve on it to an extent simply by splitting up different parts of the “social media pipeline”. I was curious what people here think of it
Ps: I really don’t mean to proselytize about one or the other!! I think it’s good that both exist. Although it does raise me the question of wether protocol diversification is good…
I don’t use it much, but from what I understand ATproto used to super expensive to self host but now costs have fallen significantly and other instances outside of the main Bluesky instance have emerged. I think now the problem they have to solve is getting the users (who are something like 99 per cent on the main Bluesky instance) over to the other instances.
I don’t really know the extent of their independence as there are at least 3 parts to how ATproto works and they can all be hosted independently (so for example, an “independent” instance might still rely on Bluesky for part if it’s functionality), however it is true that there’s quite a few ATproto services popping up!
Checked out Leaflet, it’s a simple text editor with markdown support that gives you links for sharing it with read-only or read-write permissions. I guess the ATProto is only used for discovery? You can write and edit without being logged in.
Pinksea is just random people doodling there, which can be a fun time killer. You can only interact (make your own doodle, comment on others’) logging in with bsky at the moment. The same is true for the other services, only bsky logins work (granted, I don’t have a non-bsky account to test)
I don’t think see why you’d need a bluesky-hosted account for that. I think it’s just showing
.bsky.socialas placeholder since statistically, most people have their handle hosted on bluesky and a handle can look like any valid domain.I’ll test it out once I figure out how to host my own PDS nwn
Okay, I didn’t know ATproto had many parts that can be independent or dependent on each other. It would be nice if there was an easy way to check the level of independence of an instance