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…
AP is a standard for letting servers communicate, while ATP is that and more. You could build what ATP does on top of AP, or make both compatible. What matters is really the communities and ecosystems behind these protocols.
AP is behind the Fediverse. The basic building block of the Fediverse is the instance. Every instance is its own self-contained, centralized social media service, that optionally federates with other instances via ActivityPub. There is nothing about AP that encourages decentralization. To the contrary, the way things work rn encourages centralization (but that’s pretty technical).
Case in point, Trump’s Truth Social is a Mastodon instance that choses not to federate. If it was open for federation, the Fediverse would look quite different. Or perhaps more likely, most other instances would choose to defederate.
I explain this because a few weeks ago, there were some posts pitching the Fediverse as decentralized social media. But the Fediverse is what it is because the people running the servers choose to do things a certain way. This is not a result of technical or legal features.
@Proto is the result of a project to make Twitter decentralized. That is, not a decentralized alternative, but actual Twitter with all its users. We might never have heard much about it if Musk had not taken the wrecking ball to Twitter. The team created Bluesky as a proof of concept.
Current social media companies have monopoly power over their users. @Proto seeks to structure social media in such a way that that is impossible. It is quite sophisticated. Improvements may be possible, but it certainly is good enough to solve the technical aspect of social media monopolies. Of course, the technical part was never the hard part. We will see if the economics work out. But the real challenge is the legal angle.
I mostly agree with your comment, but want to nitpick about this part:
This one is something I must disagree with. I’m using the instances (servers) I am precisely because the people running those servers choose to do things in a certain way. If they did them in a different way, I would be on a different server. In the Fediverse it is extremely easy to vote with your feet. The admins have very free reign over their instances, but that doesn’t mean that they have a free reign over the users of their instances.
Yeah it really only takes me an hour to setup a new account to my liking, easier now with piefed.
It does take a while to join all the communities you were subscribed to from your old instance, but I don’t think it took close to an hour. Of course, my new instance accepting my application did take its time. And I think that was several hours. But still: You give a few details today and continue tomorrow by subscribing to a bunch of communities.
Fascinating. The concept of AP not actually being made to encourage decentralization isn’t something I had considered before, and you do have kind of a point