[timbray]

ATProto is an interesting protocol and there is lots of room to argue about its plus and minuses (and about Fedi/Masto's), but lots of people are already doing that so I won't.

My concern isn't technology or culture, it's money. At the moment, ATProto is existentially dependent on Bluesky PBC, a venture-funded startup ($100M from Bain Capital). There are people doing good work to make it more decentralized, more power to them, but at the moment it's still deeply centralized. And it's hard to see what the business model is that will support what Bsky PBC does at a global scale. Eventually Bain will want to see a revenue stream that justifies their investment; maybe there's a way to do that that doesn't involve enshittification but it's certainly not obvious.

You can dislike the instance-centeredness of Fedi/Masto (seems to have worked OK for email over the decades) but it's an actual thing that's actually working. And offers account migration without losing followers if you don't like the instance you're on. And has multiple really excellent client software packages. And seems to be covering its costs through a mixture of Patreon, co-operative & nonprofits, some Euro-gov help, all without any VC input. It can't be bought or owned by anybody.

Put another way, this is a really interesting space. But the technology is less interesting than the culture, and the culture is less interesting than the m money.

[danabramov]

Yea that's fair. My stubborn point is that Fedi is trying to do the right thing using the wrong technology, and the resulting tradeoffs in user experience are why it will always remain niche. I hope that more resources will eventually flow from Fedi-centered solutions to more independent stuff in the atproto ecosystem.

[WhyNotHugo]

Never rely a service just because they _hope_ to one day be less decentralised.

[pfraze]

It doesn’t fully resolve your concerns, but I do want to highlight that atproto now has an IETF working group to home its spec development

[jrm4]

"Seems to have worked OK for email"

THANK YOU. It seems like far too few in this space really understand the benefits of actual decentralization.

ATProto feels like "centralized, except also we get other people to do the hard work with few of the benefits."

[kajman]

I think email is a pretty poor example of decentralization in the modern internet. I pay a company to not have to worry about hosting my own and I've still had emails blackholed by the massive providers for unknown reasons I can only assume are some combination of the custom domain* and the provider. I went back to using Gmail on my resume and for applications after nearly missing out on an interview because of it.

*: Not an .xyz, has proper SPF and DKIM records