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by glenstein
918 days ago
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Exactly. I just don't see this as an either/or. I do worry about embrace/extend/extinguish, and I don't think "well it's an open standard" is an answer. See gmail. That said, it's better for them to be on it than not be on it, and it's great as a vote of confidence in favor of Activitypub over Bluesky's go-it-alone alternative that I find counterproductive. A little of column A, a little of column B. |
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What Bluesky are really building is atproto. If bsky.app and atproto were in a house fire and the team could only rescue one, they'd rescue atproto. Throughout this year there was such demand for a Twitter alternative that wasn't Mastodon, people jumped aboard bsky.app despite it only being a testbed/PoC for the development of atproto.
The Bluesky team reviewed the existing protocols for distributed public conversation and none of them checked all the boxes. So they built their own. Their goals were [1]:
- Account portability. Being able move your entire social graph (identity, posts, follows, likes, etc) without the previous server needing to cooperate or even be online [2].
- Scale. A "big-world" view of the entire network to enable global conversation.
- Trust. Letting users build custom feeds so you can control what your timeline looks like and being open by default.
One complaint against atproto is: why not work instead to improve ActivityPub? As someone who has worked with both protocols, I agree with the Bluesky team that it would have been too difficult to retrofit these features into ActivityPub (portability and scale, especially). Plus, a lot of Mastodon power users have philosophical disagreements with the things required for "big-world" global conversation so it's unlikely Bluesky would have received a warm welcome anyway.
So, on one hand, "go-it-alone alternative" is not flagrantly wrong. Bluesky is the only app using the protocol and it does fragment the space. But it's important to remember there are reasons for why they're going alone on this.
(Sorry, I've had these ideas swimming in my head for the past few days and your comment spurred me to organize my thinking by writing it down!)
- [1] https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/3-6-2022-a-self-authenticating-s...
- [2] https://atproto.com/guides/faq#why-not-use-activitypub