can someone explain to me the "problems" that ATProtocol people tried to "solve" in comparison to ActivityPub like if i'm 12 years old
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@doriane building twitter but with the most open a possible model without losing stuff like global search, ease of signup and idk
This created cool side effects like having more services using the same data and having one source of data for completely different stuff. But this part is not 12 year old friendly when written in a toot format
@doriane You already got some pretty insightful replies here, I would maybe just add, and feel free to call me cynical, but all (most of?) the problems ATProto solves can be solved within the fediverse.
Eg. account portability with https://swicg.github.io/activitypub-data-portability/lola, discoverability with https://www.fediscovery.org, etc.
To me, what ATProto *really* solves is: coopting a grassroots movement with crypto VC funding and vibecoding. That's it.
@stefan@stefanbohacek.online @doriane@post.lurk.org I really hate posts like these.
Sure, ATProto's funding, governance, coding all suck. But this post makes improving ActivityPub hard, as it delegitimises any discussion about things AP could improve.
The account portability, as an example, is nowhere near what ATProto does and I don't count it as a solution. It requires the source server to be online and cooperating. Someone fucking up their server and not having a backup is out of luck, and so is anyone using Pixelfed (where people on the main instance can't migrate followers right now).
They can maybe be solved (even if they aren't now and the proposed solutions aren't good solutions), but this doesn't change that, right now, ATProto does some stuff better, and ActivityPub should strive to actually improve rather than going "lalalalala everything is perfect here actually".
@kbruen @stefan i'm sorry i asked in the initial post exactly with this intention: knowing not everything is perfect here and that they are other things. i know ActivityPub failed multiple social situations or movements. ATProto is more recent and they are enthusiast, so as a fediverse user i wanna understand the bigger picture!!! i also know a lot of people are going to give me their crispy hot takes opinions and tbh that's what i am asking for 😊
for example thanks to your post i learned this thing about account migration in ActivityPub that the source server need to be online and cooperating, which i agree is big constraint and a difference worth noting, and exactly the type of answer i was looking for. thank youu
@doriane Sure, but looking at https://www.da.vidbuchanan.co.uk/blog/adversarial-pds-migration.html, I am getting a sense that this is not perfect with ATProto either?
Yes, relays might have your public content, but now with Spaces and private data, I'm guessing that stuff won't show up in relays, since it's private. So how would that work, if your PDS goes down or goes rogue?
@kbruen@procial.tchncs.de
Sorry, not sure where you're getting "everything is perfect here actually".
And yeah, nomadic identity and perfect account migration across all of the fediverse would be great, I would very much love that!
Alas, I don't have the time and expertise to help implement it, nor enough money to fund the necessary work, sorry.
@doriane I wish a 12yo was interested, the other day my cousin asked me if I was “against ChatGPT” and I totally panicked because of course I wanted to say yes but at the same time no, it’s not that ChatGPT is the problem, it’s more nuanced and aaaaaaaaaaa
in the end I just told her that it’s fun to read books so here it started, the boomerification of my techsplaining
@doriane hi. I'm an author and current editor of ActivityPub.
There's a good FAQ here:
https://atproto.com/guides/faq
Roughly:
- Data portability between instances
- Scalability for small instances
- Global view of content and people, such as search
- Data format
- Domain handles instead of email-like handles
- Algorithmic feeds
@doriane another is governance. Bluesky started as a project at Twitter to provide a backplane for federation between commercial social networks. They were going to spin out as an independent company that would provide that backplane as a service. Using an open protocol would defeat that business model, since the other networks could just interoperate without paying Bluesky. So, they built their own.
@doriane I hope @thisismissem answers this one 
@liaizon @thisismissem hello! i would greatly appreciate too 😊 i heard there was a sex worker mastodon instance project that failed because of weakness in activity pub security and other stuffs (https://switter.at/). i see that Emelia you work on tech for sex worker, anything to do with ATProto linked to this? i'd love to learn how in certain social use case we need stuff from ATProto and where ActivityPub failed if that's the case. love
@doriane @liaizon I'd suggest re-reading switter.at's website since it clearly states what happened.
Yes, as an early moderator on switter.at, the Fediverse did not have appropriate tools to allow our community to co-exist. We got a lot of reports that were enabled by unsafe design and user behaviours.
That's how mastodon gained a lot of the tools in the moderator UI — we (primarily me) added them to be able to effectively moderate.
@doriane the generous answer: data portability. it decouples user identity and user data from the service you use. it also (by virtue of only being theoretically decentralised, not actually) makes it so there's no upfront choice as to which server you're on, which eases the signup process for any particular service.
@v oh interesting i see! so instead of having an account on an instance of some fediverse server like i'm @doriane (in lurk), i can only have one atp id/account that's the same on bluesky and whatever other stuff and that's "me" like just doriane, then my content can be different per server, app, service whatver.
but then i guess the registry of those identity must follow some synching process through atp instances right that eventually converge or some shit? bc in fedi every instances will have a registry of their users, but atp is one big list of identities that propagate? (if at some point it actually decentralize yes)
@doriane there's two identity systems - one that's backed by having a file on your web site, and one that's a central registry - you can use either. but it's a (cryptographically signed) pointer to a data store which is the canonical source of truth for your posts and profile and any other information you've generated. and then there are lots of relays/caches that propagate that out elsewhere to the actual services (which can listen to a subset of that data). and you can trust the relays because stuff is, again, signed.
@v thanks for your very generous answers, it helps a lot to draw a mind pictures :))) but so the whole ATProto thing does rely on a central registry ok well that's a super big difference wow... where is that central registry that is the canonical source of truth and who owns it, is it the bluesky team? and when you say you can use either, that means i could make my PDS or instance of the ATProto and decide to not use the big central registry but have my own, but then i loose the nomadic/portable identity thing?
@doriane Two possible theories; only one is true.
Theory 1. ActivityPub has no "center"; each server handles only its own traffic. This means that if a startup wanted to start an ActivityPub startup, it cannot justify its own existence. Users could simply not use the startup's products, meaning you can't move from the "expand" to "cash in" phases. Forcing everything through the funnel of the relay makes the startup "necessary". You can only replace the startup with ops resources equal to it.
@doriane Theory 2. Entire-network full text search. Ex-Twitter users expect this; in practice you cannot implement it with high quality user experience unless every "node" in your decentralized network has access to every message in the network. If this is a "must have", the rest of Bluesky's architecture (scrape PDSes->relay funnel->AppView) falls out naturally. The relay means every AppView sees everything that happens and can build its index accordingly
@mcc oh so it's really like activitypub is a lot of little islands and well you can't see a faraway island from your island if you never went there and that's it that's the nature of knowing and not knowing
while atp is more a babel-tower/panopticon in the center of the islands and whenever you want to know if an island exist you ask mr. know-it-all the big source of truth, and all the islands must conform to effectively know everything otherwise they are bad islands?
is it an anarchist ideologies versus humanist ideologies type of situation?
@mcc if anyone else is reading this thread with my level of knowledge, PDS means Personal Data Server (took me 5 links with PDS used until i reached the acronynim unfolding), which is like when you copy the big index on your own server, like your island that's a copy of other islands?
also the thing that send all the synching data so that the PDS stay in synch (to be sure you have eyes everywhere) is called a "firehose" like big data pipelines?
the "fediverse", the "atmosphere", ok baby have you ever went to the "parc" to "touch some grass" ? it's also social and local and interoperable (you can be there for walk, or party, or sport and still gossip with each others).
ok im being a cynical brat i know but i wanna understand why sometimes protocol battles matters and also who's winning by providing the most computationally-abstracted model of freedom lol and why it's not escapism through problem-solving instead of looking at stuff that always made community with actual human like idk situatedness and in-groups with shared values, exciting subcultures, gossiping and intimacy, trust over privacy, and most importantly where are the funny & cool people and all those bangers
@doriane Honestly the only person in the Atmosphere that I see genuinely talking about meaningful things beyond tech is @rude1.blacksky.team.
Ultimately, it’s very interesting to see how many (thankfully not all 💜) techies here and there want to address problems and they end up picking up fights but I still see most people being obsessed with the technology, except for the people at Blacksky and at @anewsocial.
EDIT: not true not true! I forgot about @meri.garden, I absolutely loved her article from DWeb Camp
A New Social specifically focuses on the fact that you should be free to have the level of intimacy, interaction, etc. you want, and protocols should not matter this much.
IMHO frankly most developers and implementers are still in the same 0.01% bubble, thinking that they will solve x problem through a tool but they miss the fundamental point that the crowd out there still does not have the faintest idea wtf we are talking about. It’s about time we all burst the social web bubble if we really want to call it the OPEN Social Web. We have to go outside of it, first. Then maybe we would know what would actually be helpful.
I stopped worrying about protocols a while ago, now I am just casually checking what’s up. E.g. I am intrigued by ATproto Spaces but the fact that this arrived at a later moment and it was not there by design at the beginning, tells me a lot about the priorities of ATproto devs.
@doriane Pierre from @technostructures explained that to me (eternal 12yo) pretty well last year but it was a long time ago and my mind erased most of it so I hope they can reply to you (it had something to do with the concept of "group" missing from ActivityPub, and a question of balance of power between users and tech-people ?
@ligaturerecords @doriane those are topics that we enjoy but I don't think they're related to the creation of ATProto.
in addition to things that have already been said, like data portability, they also start the protocol's white paper with mentioning the issue of "missing replies" between instances.
Now @technostructures we want YOU to tell us why neither ATproto nor ActivityPub matter and we should just use XMPP ooooopsie I meant Matrix 🤪
@tommi yep there's a talk that should be made an article 😅
though beside some (important) technical points, it mostly comes down to what's inside @fediversereport articles about Matrix!
