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…
I don’t use it much, but from what I understand ATproto used to super expensive to self host but now costs have fallen significantly and other instances outside of the main Bluesky instance have emerged. I think now the problem they have to solve is getting the users (who are something like 99 per cent on the main Bluesky instance) over to the other instances.
I don’t really know the extent of their independence as there are at least 3 parts to how ATproto works and they can all be hosted independently (so for example, an “independent” instance might still rely on Bluesky for part if it’s functionality), however it is true that there’s quite a few ATproto services popping up!
Okay, I didn’t know ATproto had many parts that can be independent or dependent on each other. It would be nice if there was an easy way to check the level of independence of an instance
I don’t see any glaring issues with ActivityPub that appear to be solved with these alternatives.
The alternatives look like they’re not as open, though, so that leads me to believe they only exist to sucker people who don’t know any better onto yet another proprietary platform.
I think nostr has the best protocol, specifically the way they handle identity.
I hadn’t considered Nostr up until now, might look into it further, seems interesting
Last I looked into it, running an ATproto relay is highly cost-prohibitive compared to a fediverse instance.
The protocol is basically irrelevant. It’s about the user population and their dependence on particular hosts.
This place has federation issues a few times a year. Irrelevant 🤣.
To an extent. I can’t say I’m well-versed in how to make a successful social media platform but I think having a solid protocol underneath is essential. I’ve been bothered a couple of times by a Mastodon user with an empty account because nobody had followed them previously
