I think ActivityPub is closer to the right answer than ATProto, and ActivityPub’s issues (though many, as the author notes) are more manageable in the long run. I think the article makes a good analysis of the fundamental differences, but is a bit glib in referring to Piefed’s topics and discussion merging as a “joyful mess”. It’s not a mess at all. It’s making order out of the chaos, and it’s the right way to build on top of ActivityPub into something that is actually fluid enough for users to actually use.

Mailing lists were built on top of federated email in much the same way, and they formed enduring, resilient, well-structured communities, some that continue to this day (the LKML being perhaps the most notorious)

I think ATProto makes creating enduring communities too difficult, and BlackSky illustrates that perfectly. The author’s criticism of ActivityPub, on the other hand, seems to be that it makes creating communities too easy, and this results in a “mess”. I disagree, I think the mess is a necessary and inevitable part of having community. Communities are messy. They fracture and schism, they rejoin and reshape themselves. That’s normal. It is the responsibility of the software to make sense of the mess and make it presentable, and with ActivityPub, that is not only possible, it is happening. Piefed is the present example. I expect there will be more examples, and a wider variety of them, as the ecosystem continues to develop.

I think the biggest thing that ActivityPub still needs is better portability, for both users and communities, to allow moving servers more seamlessly. The “Personal Data Server” of Bluesky is not a bad concept, although I don’t love their implementation. I think ActivityPub can find a way to handle portability even better, but it doesn’t seem like it’s been a priority, and that’s fine. But it will need to happen eventually.