Jack Dorsey skipped ActivityPub, built AtProto, lost Twitter, funded Bluesky, watched it become a company with VCs and a board, said it was "repeating all the mistakes," left, and now funds Nostr.
The fediverse is the only one in this story that never needed a billionaire to survive.
And it never will. 🔥
@dansup I don’t understand why people here feel the need to diminish others’ work to boost their own. ActivityPub is great, but it still lacks things that AT Protocol is actively solving. Dorsey isn’t working on AT Protocol anymore, you already pointed that out. Instead of burning bridges, let’s build them and aim for a more connected ecosystem. If you spend 5 minutes reading what the people over there are saying and their roadmap you would realize they are an ally rather than an enemy!
@dansup great example of how money doesn’t equal smarts 🤡
@dansup It's important to note that Dorsey left BlueSky when Bluesky introduced content moderation. That's what he meant by 'repeating all the mistakes'.
@dansup I'm laughing out loud at how bad the Nostr homepage copy is. What's that law where techbros building communication tools don't understand that communication is important....?
@dansup
Are others fighting to survive or dominate ?
This concept shall henceforth be referred to as .... Chasing Twitter.
@dansup @quillmatiq while I agree on your take on bluesky, the existence of Blacksky and others show that atproto is a viable decentralized protocol and is beyond the control of bluesky, the company. Im hopeful there will be more bridges that will connect that will connect activitypub to atproto like Bridgyfed or services that have interoperability built in like Wafrn
@adamtewodros @dansup @quillmatiq
blacksky should build on activitypub
if they build on atproto, ok
good luck to them
but they seem to be choosing a sinking ship
@benroyce It's our own fault that they didn't, though. Black people have been actively pushed out of this community.
You've probably read this by now, but here it is again.
https://logicmag.io/policy/blackness-in-the-fediverse-a-conversation-with-marcia-x/
And of course: https://privacy.thenexus.today/start-making-the-fediverse-less-toxic/
@stefan @adamtewodros @dansup @quillmatiq
zero argument
i remember reading mekka's posts about the sordid harassment, that us while folks just don't see
that's a struggle we have a duty to help with
i can see jumping to atproto as a valid response
i just fear that whole ecosystem is doomed, because of bluesky
maybe bluesky crashes, and blacksky picks up from the ashes
regardless, it's fruitful to fight the fucking reply guy bigots on mastodon, as an ethos, and with technical improvements
@benroyce Absolutely!
But I'm just not seeing this as being important enough to the development of Mastodon in particular.
When people called out the strong opposition to quote posts as racist, given that the sort of call-and-response style of conversation has been so popular on Black Twitter, I thought this was reaching a bit.
But now we're looking at the most requested feature, the ability to disable replies, which many agree would help with the harassment particularly marginalized voices receive on here, and again, there is so much pushback, as well from the overall community here.
Starting to see a pattern.
@benroyce And yes, we all know there are technical challenges making that happen, but given this was requested back in 2018, it tells you all you need to know about priorities.
@dansup Nostr is a good idea, unfortunately nobody is talking to each other and everyone wants funding from the same wallet.
@dansup We're stronger together, Dan. It's not worth throwing stones.
@quillmatiq hard to see Bluesky as part of a "together", yet Bluesky is still better off without Jack Dorsey, than with.
@sunnythesheep I'm not talking about Bluesky, I'm talking about atproto, which now includes a variety of services, many of which have no connection to Bluesky with their tech stack.
@quillmatiq I see your point. Still love services who stick to ActivityPub, for interoperability, more.
@quillmatiq not throwing stones, just spittin facts. To much glazing over AtProto when many seem to forget its history, so I feel a duty to remind people of this.
ATProto never cared about openness or the social web, or they would have adopted ActivityPub and helped improve it.
They had to control everything. Jack even said he regrets that himself.
@dansup @quillmatiq heya Dan! Going to do the mastodon/activitypub thing - I think you mean Bluesky
ATProto has a thriving community that I and others are part of.
I care about openness and the social web, which is why I spend time with the ATProto community
Feel free to yell at Bluesky-the-company
@dansup @quillmatiq Anuj, this is unfair.
There is a significant difference in intent and governance between ActivityPub and ATProto.
It's perfectly reasonable to point out those differences, just like the atproto.com site points out technical differences.
@evan @dansup @quillmatiq True, ATProto's intent is to cash in and make it's backers rich, ActivityPub's intent is to provide a protocol for an open web.
Thanks for calling that out!
@reflex @dansup @quillmatiq I think Anuj's point is that there is a growing ecosystem around ATProto that is not owned or controlled by Bluesky LLC. There are a lot of people in that ecosystem that are just as concerned about decentralization and distribution of control as we are. Many people in the LLC even support that decentralization. It is a serious bummer that it's splitting the social web, but at least we have bridges and multistack services to connect us.
@evan @reflex @dansup @quillmatiq thanks for summarising Evan. Is there an accessible (non-dev) article available to explain the makeup of the ATProto ecosystem and the chances of it not being a target/surviving without Bluesky? As a tech-aware/non-dev person, I am not interested in the respective merits of the actual protocols, more about each's ability to thrive away from VC (dev community size, culture, capitalist power dynamics... what else?)
Pushing a separate protocol has undoubtedly hurt the entire distributed social networking movement. It was done intentionally.
It shouldn't have worked. ActivityPub should have been more widespread by the time that ATProto launched, so that a competing protocol would have no chance to split the network.
But we weren't, and it did. It's at least partially our fault that a house-brand protocol has been such a serious threat.
@evan @dansup @quillmatiq Evan, perhaps spend some time introspecting why ActivityPub didn't get more adoption and why developers love AT Protocol.
@thisismissem @dansup @quillmatiq This is my number one area of interest!
@thisismissem @evan @dansup @quillmatiq
Why do you think this is Emelia?
@thisismissem @evan @dansup @quillmatiq
Why do you think this is Emelia?
@thisismissem @evan @quillmatiq more adoption, like Metas Threads? There are dozens of projects on the fediverse, more than atproto, so that’s not really coming across as you think it is lol
@dansup So ActivityPub needed VC money, too?
Btw, Fediverse Threads is in maintenance mode and is one-way, basically RSS with likes, so are we going to even consider it a part of the ecosystem at this point?
@dansup Also, I'm sorry, I have to ask - but how many independent services do you think atproto has right now? Because it's not just a handful, as you're making it out to be.
@quillmatiq @dansup @thisismissem @evan
How many Anuj?
And, what constitutes an AT Proto "independent service"?
@mastodonmigration @quillmatiq @dansup @thisismissem @evan I'm curious to know as well. I'm not dead-set against ATproto, and I like some of their ideas on paper, but i only really know of one public full-stack reimplementation that could exist if Bsky disappeared overnight - BlackSky. But last I read (admittedly been a minute), they're still dependent on Bsky for the plc directory, right? I'd like to be better informed if this is no longer the case, or if there are other fully independent full stack implementations!
@baralheia @mastodonmigration @quillmatiq @dansup @evan
PLC directory is in the process of being moved to a swiss association, it's just taking time, because legal stuff always takes time.
https://docs.bsky.app/blog/plc-directory-org
The thing about AT Protocol is that you don't *need* to reimplement the entire stack to be independent. You can push people towards independently hosted PDSes, you can use non-Bluesky relays, you can build your own application and social graph. You can run your own moderation systems.
Bluesky is a tiny subset of what we can do on AT Protocol: microblogging. There's so much more happening: video streaming, blogging, science collaboration, annotating the web, links and bookmarking, E2EE messaging, source control management (git), books and pop culture reviews, Q&A services, a container registry, a package management service, music scrobbling, learning journeys, work profiles, video sharing, etc.
I've probably missed at least a few entire categories here.
ActivityPub forces you to re-implement the entire stack, AT Protocol allows you to do it progressively or reuse community infrastructure.
If you think of AT Protocol as Bluesky, then that'd be the same as thinking of ActivityPub as Mastodon. Far too many ActivityPub developers fall into that trap of "I must be compatible with mastodon" that it stifles innovation.
@thisismissem @mastodonmigration @quillmatiq @dansup @evan I appreciate this information, but my main interest in modern decentralized social media protocols is for social media (microblogging, as well as picture & video sharing), and I am not a developer - just a nerd. My primary concern in all of this is I simply don't trust Bluesky PBLLC. That's why complete and total independence from their infrastructure from a microblogging standpoint is important to me before I would ever consider using an ATproto-based service as my primary social media platform. While I'm okay using community resources for now, I *want* the ability to host my own completely independent full stack so I would never need to rely on a company or community to stand up a relay or AppView or something. I can do that easily and *cheaply* today with Mastodon or WAFRN (the ActivityPub side of it, anyway) or Pixelfed or Loops - it's not a big lift because these platforms were already designed with the full stack as a single deployment. This makes the network highly resistant to adversarial takeover, especially as things exist *right now*. It's a far, far, far bigger lift to stand up a similarly independent full stack of Bluesky (for example), and far far far easier for the majority of the network to be compromised if all statuses must be funneled through corporate or community chokepoints.
Tl;dr if I can't easily host a full stack that can run completely on it's own (while still being able to federate with others), that's not independence. *Every* service built on top of ActivityPub can give me that independence *by design*. It's the difference between human-scale networking and corporate-scale networking.
If there's an easy, lightweight, fully independent way for me to participate in Bluesky-compatible microblogging on ATproto with an experience that is comparable to what I'd get from using Bluesky directly, I'm interested to learn more - because I'm not currently aware of anything like that. I can get that from multiple platforms on AP *today*.
@evan @dansup What's hurt it more is not working together on a unified strategy and putting up walls every time there's a chance to do so.
There are folks on the atproto side who have shown an intent to bridge with services like Pixelfed and Loops, *including* adding the logo on the posts to help promote services. We can either move together, or we can continue to push each other away and fall to trillion-dollar companies building their own ecosystems, some of whom the Fedi bet the farm on.
@quillmatiq I like your vision of peace and collaboration. But when there is a working protocol and a team builds a completely new one that is not compatible with the existing. Who is building a wall? When I want to build a new "open social web" service or client, how many protocols should I need to implement? This is not about if mastodon or pixelfed could be Atproto compatible, it's not about services it's about the protocol. @evan @dansup
@quillmatiq @evan @dansup I have been thinking about trying to do some sort of protocol bridging with my project Fedi+ but then that runs the risk of people like FediTips getting on the wrong side of things being like oh Fedi+ interacts with fashists or whatever all because of the protocol being associated with Bluesky, which verified ICE and other US government accounts, and so on. My goal with Fedi+ is to not only create that vibe people loved when Google+ was around, but also to make it super easy for people who don't care about Mastodon or ActivityPub or whatever to join on and not even need to think about the protocols behind the scenes.
@quillmatiq @evan what walls? The fediverse literally worked with Meta for Threads federation, we’ve been here and open to collaboration, they went off and made a worse implementation that is even more difficult to full self host.
I appreciate the ability for interop, but I’m not wrong about this.
I think there is a lot to applaud in the ATProto community in terms of the growing openness, the standardization of part of the stack, and the great work engaging third-party developers.
If ATProto can overcome its origins and single point of failure, great.
But it's gross to gaslight ActivityPub developers that those origins don't exist and it never happened, and don't talk about them when strangers are watching.
@dansup This is such a miscommunication of what's happening. Happy to chat with you about it sometime, but I highly recommend not taking a billionaire's word over what that ecosystem is and what it's meant to be.
@quillmatiq
Aren't the billionaires the ones designing the ecosystem now?
