@wjmaggos That doesn't make any sense; it's like saying that you want Chinese and Spanish to be mutually intelligible. You could try to combine the two languages into one mixed thing, but that resulting language would be neither Chinese nor Spanish.
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Re: Would you like to see full default interoperability between #ATproto and #ActivityPub without a bridge?
@evan@cosocial.ca @wjmaggos@liberal.city clearly what we need is one final protocol to rule them all /s
@evan @wjmaggos you're making a category error, Evan.
People who aren't us don't give even the tiniest shits about which protocols they're using. 5G phones happily talk to 2G phones over SS7, and the only thing anyone knows about "5G" is that it's "fast" – and they don't even know what that means.
You just said approx. "that doesn't make any sense; it's like saying that you want NG-RAN and SS7 to be mutually intelligible" and people will care about as much as someone who literally says that.
@blaine @wjmaggos The first question asked by the poll is "Would you like to see full default interoperability between #ATproto and #ActivityPub without a bridge?"
The second question is "what's preventing this".
@evan @wjmaggos you're reading it as a technologist – I agree with you that making atproto and activitypub literally interoperable is ... weird (although, I have argued many times that I think the two protocols will converge in functionality and scope, and also separately that lens-based translation of data structures is basically the best thing and would smooth right over the lexicon/AS differences if we had good tooling).
@evan @wjmaggos ... but that's not what the question is asking. It's intent, and the #atproto and #activitypub in the question aren't referring to specifications, they're referring to communities.
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but that assumes there won't be any appreciable experiential diff. at this point, I think there will be. I don't expect anything like fully independent news or government servers on AT.
see @mondoweiss trying to use AT and consider pressure from Israel on most relays. their ability to get a critical story to go viral would be crushed.
arguing over protocols should be focused on why we care about decentralization. which model will be most likely to get us the future we want.
@evan @wjmaggos (i.e. not at all)
It makes plenty sense to make BlueSky and Mastodon interoperable, even if it involves protocol-level translation. Doing so is, frankly, easy, and much easier than the very common approach of translating between Spanish and Chinese (which is what we normally do to communicate instead of inventing a Spanish/Chinese pidgin, which is also a thing humans do!).
@evan @blaine @wjmaggos One possible problem with that is that even if that happened, this would mean that when one random person follows you from Bluesky, all your future posts would become visible in the open on a public website and the global firehose and to the 30M+ Bluesky users. From what I know about Mastodon users, a lot of them would probably not like that… (since a lot of them very loudly objected specifically to that when Snarfed wanted Bridgy to work this way at first).
@blaine @evan @wjmaggos it would be nice to consider both protocols part of the same system, and then refactor a bit to clean things up. Eg the bsky firehose and AP relays could be the same thing, a typical AP instance could be reinterpreted as a collection of PDSs, AP messaging would augment ATproto with non-public features etc.
The one thing is that atproto as designed is effectively centrally managed and top down.
For fun, we can think about three different protocols in the way that they function. ActivityPub, atproto, and nostr.
Nostr would be the most decentralized and most individualist. You don't even pick a single server, you pick on number of different relays which will accept your messages and provide messages to you. It really doesn't matter if in the end which individual relays you pick because in practice it's just a ledger with all the messages that it received, and the protocol itself handles identity through your secret key. If the relay that you were using goes down, your user experience doesn't even notice because there's probably 10 others.
ATproto would be the least decentralized and most collective. It is hypothetically possible to host your own instance, but in practice user management and a lot of other stuff is Central to the main Bluesky organization. Getting banned or getting blocked or whatever, it's not that different from Facebook in that regard. If the main Bluesky service goes down, it will effectively mean the end of bluesky.
ActivityPub would be somewhere in between. You have individual servers that people will pick one or multiple, there is a centralized point where your identity lives, and each server has its own moderation policies and administrator team. If one server goes down, everyone on that server loses access to the fediverse on that server and they also lose their identity from that server, but they can very easily go somewhere else. If mastodon.social goes down, a lot of accounts will become inaccessible but the broader fediverse will be unaffected.
Bridges are obviously possible between the three because we see it, but I tend to think that the three are mutually exclusive and mutually incompatible in their aims and technical details such that integrating any two immediately means giving up some of what that protocol is trying to do.
@evan @wjmaggos where the real "human-level" challenge is is that e.g. Mastodon and BlueSky are different, culturally, and so are "the Fediverse" and "Truth Social" and any combination of separate servers that we can imagine, or even two random servers *within* the Mastodon-running-Fediverse. Mastodon and Bluesky are way more similar than Pixelfed, and it makes much less sense to federate Pixelfed and Mastodon than it does Mastodon and Bluesky, because they serve different social purposes.
@blaine @wjmaggos @evan I'm clinging to “decentralization” as part of my answer to the “What's this Fedimoose thing you keep talking about and why should I care?” because the best explanation I have found is "social networks suck, except for one social network that's been working OK for 40 years, namely email. Why doesn't email suck? Because it's decentralized, nobody owns it."
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so don't we have to propose visions and see which ones make the most sense, are most popular, are compatible?
what's special about social media is the boost. virality. not community or the public square. making it decentralized without algos or ads puts the people fully in control. collectively we can determine what info, ideas and art gets the most attention. I think that's the revolution @rabble talks about. I call it #DemocracyOfReach.
which protocol makes that most likely?
@evan @wjmaggos you're making a category error, Evan.
People who aren't us don't give even the tiniest shits about which protocols they're using. 5G phones happily talk to 2G phones over SS7, and the only thing anyone knows about "5G" is that it's "fast" – and they don't even know what that means.
You just said approx. "that doesn't make any sense; it's like saying that you want NG-RAN and SS7 to be mutually intelligible" and people will care about as much as someone who literally says that.
ok. so would the closest to this be getting apps to do the bridging?
of course I used to ask both threads and bluesky to do this, until my Instagram account got suspended. they never told me why but I assume they considered me spam. bluesky marks me as spam sometimes.
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