[nosuchthing]

Isn't ATProto just a compromised version of Activity Pub, basically designed around an excuse to force all users into a data mining firehose structure like twitter used to have only there's no privacy features or federation for moderation controls?

[southerntofu]

Disclaimer: i'm rather hostile to ATProto for reinventing the wheel without bringing much value over AP/XMPP/Matrix.

I don't think that's a fair characterization. Most AP implementations famously don't have privacy features: it was by design (and therefore no surprise to us tech folks), but i remember it was quite the scandal when users found out Mastodon instance admins could read users' private messages. A later "scandal" involved participation in the EUNOMIA research project about "provenance tracking" in federated networks [1], which to be fair to conspiracy theorists does sound like an academic front for NSA-style firehose R&D.

That being said, Bluesky is much harder to selfhost and is therefore not decentralized in practice. [2] See also Blacksky development notes. However, Bluesky does bring a very interesting piece to the puzzle which AP carefully ignored despite years of research in AP-adjacent protocols (such as Hubzilla): account portability.

All in all, i'm still siding on the ActivityPub ecosystem because i think it's much more ethical and friendly in all regards, and i'm really sad so many so-called journalists, researchers and leftists jumped ship to Bluesky just because the attraction of "Twitter reborn" (with the same startup nation vibes) was too strong. At least in my circles, i did not meet a single person who mentioned the choice of Bluesky was about UX or features.

But now, i'm slowly warming up to the ATmosphere having a vibrant development community. Much more so than AP. And to be fair to ATProto, it is worse than AP from a centralization standpoint, but at least it's not as bad and complex as the matrix protocol which brought 0 value over AP/XMPP but made implementations 100x more complex and resource-intensive.

[1] https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/825171/reporting

[2] https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/

[verdverm]

> But now, i'm slowly warming up to the ATmosphere having a vibrant development community.

I build in the ATmosphere because I want to effect change. AP was hostile, Nostr is for crypto bros. The @dev community is one of the strongest pieces and attractors

One way I like to think about how the protocol is different is that they made a giant event system for the public content and then let anyone plug in anywhere they want

https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers

[verdverm]

That's what the haters proclaim, it's from a position of bias and/or jealousy

ATProtocol made a decision, based on the other protocols, to put more emphasis on user experience. If you want to build a new social media fabric for everyone, they have to want to use it. AP / Nostr have UX that will never appeal to the masses.

[greentea23]

Yes. Nostr and ActivityPub are so easy too, I don't see much advantage to ATProto and so many disadvantages. It's as decentralized as a meme coin, just waiting for the rug pull.

To me something git-like with a peer review UI (a la pull requests) seems far more natural for distributed academic publications than a social media protocol though.

[crimsoneer]

So I briefly touched on this in the blog post, but to expand a little... ATProto provides significantly more "batteries included" than ActivityPub in my view - if you use ATProto, it can handle both authentication and identity management, and effectively act as your back-end and CRUD operations (eg, oauth with your PDS, and then write/read from the network for your object creation based on your Lexicon).

ActivityPub, based on my understanding, really doesn't work like that - while you an oauth with your mastodon account, the expectation is you'll be handling identity and back-end bits, and then sharing events across the network (happy to be corrected).

Part of what kicked this off is seeing ATProto's new devrel person at a meetup and finding their vision pretty compelling.

But yes, ActivityPub is more "robust" and decentralised (hence also jankier)

https://andreasthinks.me/posts/octosphere/octosphere.html

[verdverm]

It's for more than publishing, it's for science, which involves people collaborating and communicating