@boris @scottjenson Yes, sorry for using “instances”. But trust me, I want federated services to flourish, regardless of protocol.
To be honest, I’m glad the “ATmosphere” name’s been coined. People need to talk about that, the way others talk about the Fediverse, or the Web, and not ATProto, ActivityPub, or HTTP. The protocols are for developers. The rest needs communities, identities, and to know of the services that provide the means to connect. Imho, of course.
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@scottjenson will you be at FOSDEM this year, perchance? would love to grab a coffee
@by_caballero I would love to be there but alas, flights to Europe from California are a bit pricey
@scottjenson realistically speaking i doubt we'll see the ATmosphere (cool name btw) be decentralised. The way their relays work is making sure only the rich can manage it.
@tragivictoria that is the one critique I hear over and over: relays are the decentralized weak point of #ATProto.
People love to complain about how odd #ActivityPub data sync is (which is true!) but I'd argue it's "good enough" and has the advantage of working on $5/month servers
@tragivictoria BTW, I'm just repeating "common wisdom" but i've been recently told relays actually are quite cheap and not nearly as expensive as I was told. Happy to be corrected here. Are there relays popping up that haven't been given their due?
@scottjenson in the end of the day all that matters is figuring out healthy "social media", online discourses where we share valuable information, enhance emotional states, share the wonder and pain of life. Devising digital environments that make us all better humans, more wholesome, less ugly societies, at times of great collective peril 🖖
If technically the way to achieve that is via COBOL running on a single mainframe monolith or billions of chatty Raspberry Pi's, its irrelevant really 🤦
@scottjenson once again going to ask that you say #ATProto and not Bluesky.
We’re trying. Like many distributed open source systems, this is bottoms up community work. Pointing at Bluesky-the-company erases our work.
It’s not Bluesky’s job, it’s the ecosystems job.
@boris @scottjenson There’s been a great effort of talking about the Fediverse, and not just Mastodon.
https://jointhefediverse.net/ (among others)
But if we’re talking about Mastodon, there’s been an effort to offer different instances:
https://joinmastodon.org/ (directly from Mastodon)
You search “Join Fediverse” or “Join Mastodon”, and you get offered a choice.
What do you get when you search “Join Bluesky”? Or “Join ATmosphere”? (Didn’t know that was even a thing)
@dmian @scottjenson there’s a just kicking off UX research project (that Scott just became aware of) that is doing work on the best messaging for this.
Bluesky is one product but also a microblog data type (like ActivityPub Notes type that Mastodon and others implement).
You can choose your account host completely separate even from your app with ATProto, so it’s different.
@boris @dmian @scottjenson this is something that was designed into ActivityPub and has largely been ignored. We're doing a lot of work on it at the W3C SocialCG group.
@dmian @scottjenson here’s a (Brazilian) list of PDS account hosts as an example
https://blog.vicwalker.dev.br/3lz4g6zxeic2p
And fun fact this is a long form blog data type running on the Leaflet app, whose data lives in this user’s account.
I also don’t expect a centralized “join” site because that’s not how ATProto works. Tricky to explain!
@boris @scottjenson I’m also on Bluesky, I’ve been waiting to see other instances interacting with it or even, a bridge to ActivityPub (heck! Even Threads was trying!) I’m still waiting. If you put all your efforts on selling just one place, if you don’t put your weight into promoting the community (the protocol is irrelevant to the user, most Fediverse users don’t know about ActivityPub), you have no interest in federating, imho.
@dmian @scottjenson ATProto doesn’t have “instances” and this is part of the disconnect with fedi users looking for these full stack installs as they call them.
Here’s my presentation from #Fedicon where I walk through a dozen or so different apps / data types https://bmannconsulting.com/notes/beyond-microblogging-atproto/
Some re-use Bluesky’s microblog type, many others have built their own.
It’s not better, it’s just _different_ with different trade offs.
@boris @scottjenson Yes, sorry for using “instances”. But trust me, I want federated services to flourish, regardless of protocol.
To be honest, I’m glad the “ATmosphere” name’s been coined. People need to talk about that, the way others talk about the Fediverse, or the Web, and not ATProto, ActivityPub, or HTTP. The protocols are for developers. The rest needs communities, identities, and to know of the services that provide the means to connect. Imho, of course.
@dmian @scottjenson yep, I agree! Hence this UX research. And why erasing the community I’m helping build is sad.
Come join us at #ATmosphereConf this March in Vancouver https://news.atmosphereconf.org
DM me if you want more info.
@boris totally fair and my apologies. I did say BOTH product names and not their protocols so I'm an equal opportunity oversimplifier.
But you are correct and I'll do better.
@scottjenson appreciate you Scott.
@boris totally fair and my apologies. I did say BOTH product names and not their protocols so I'm an equal opportunity oversimplifier.
But you are correct and I'll do better.
@scottjenson yep! I built the site to - I hope - watch the atmosphere decentralize in practice!