It is entirely conceivable to me that ATProto “wins” the technical battle, Mastodon “wins” its ideological battle, and most users end up back on X, Threads, or Instagram.
There’s this anti-social quality to it all that is truly poetic. And horrible.
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@mattiem After seeing all of the energy put into duplicating ATProto/PDS only to discover the big lie about federation has me very skeptical of the success of the protocol. Nor have I seen any chatter about technical advantages.
Once the VC money goes away I expect it to wither quickly.
@puppethead I do not think that was actually a big lie. I think federation on ATProto is real.
Yeah, I'm not sure what the "big lie" here is.
There's already a lot of independent community infrastructure, see https://atp.fyi/network.
Blacksky runs fully independently from Bluesky the company, and they even host two other communities, Medsky and Latinsky.
Eurosky is also making a ton of progress.
I think the broader Atmosphere has the same problem as the fediverse in that most people just want to pick the one "main" community/server/what have you and post/follow people.
@stefan @puppethead I *think* the core weakness is in the relay system. But I don’t understand enough of the core infrastructure to be 100% sure that the current decentralization could function without Bluesky keeping those working.
@mattiem @puppethead I do agree though that the time and effort would've been better spent on fixing the issues with the fediverse, both technological and cultural.
But that's also the responsibility of those of us here. I think we can still make everyone feel welcome and safe when Bluesky the company runs out of money. We just have to put in the effort.
@mattiem I loathe "us vs. them" discussions between atproto and AP and wish there was more convergence between the two ecosystems.
Also, we can't change the nature of things - ATProto is a US-centric-ex-Facebook-sort-of-engineering (and the marketing of it) and ActivityPub comes from semantic-web-humans-bring-their-own-adventure culture which makes them ideologically incompatible. Only active roadmap and culture work on both sides can bring them closer but it may be too late
@iamkonstantin I think changing those organizations is probably hopeless. But I’m not ready to give up on a technical solution that side-steps both.
@mattiem Most users have never left X or Instagram in the first place. Changing the world is never easy. We’re in for the long run.
@Gargron I have no doubt!
But what I hope for is a hybrid ActivityPub/ATProto service. Technically, very messy and with massive tradeoffs, but collaboration is the only truly social move I see here.
@mattiem That's a nice thought, but even if there was any incentive/interest on the ATProto end (eg. there is https://github.com/blacksky-algorithms/rsky/issues/125, so who knows!), and/or if there was enough funding and resources on the fediverse side, the best outcome would probably be that it would be something people would have to opt into, which is fair, but looking at how this went with Threads, I wouldn't expect many to do that.
@mattiem The best case scenario I can see for the fediverse is Bluesky the company running out of money (https://stefanbohacek.online/@stefan/116697583448447818) and by that time Mastodon/fediverse implementing reply controls, better account portability, and admins getting better at handling harassment.
We'll see!
