What about AT protocol?
What about AT protocol?
Bluesky, which uses it, has been opened to federation now, and the standard basically just looks better than ActivityPub. Has anyone heard about a project to make a Lemmy-style "link aggregator" service on it?
ha, no.. bluesky is not open to federation. they control the only router and do not allow connectivity to routers not controlled by them.
there isnt a single non-bluesky controlled instance that can federate natively with bluesky.
bluesky is just twitter with a little more user-controllable data sourcing. not that theres anything wrong with that, but its certainly not a part of any federation.
e. suggested reading: https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
I believe the "free our feeds" people are working to change this though.
And they are either in for one of the following:
- a $30 Million lesson where they learn that they will have to reinvent ActivityPub in order to be "properly" decentralized
- a rug pull where they come up with a second relay like Bluesky but fork to give exclusive access for large institutions and the enterprise.
It's a good blog post, thanks. I made a quick summery elsewhere in the thread.
It's really unfortunate that we've ended up with two populated protocols for federation, both of which have a major flaw. In our case, it's no established support for moving accounts. In theirs, its a component that's so bulky the federatability is questionable (and no federated DMs).
This is such a well written piece, it's closer to a serious article than a blogpost
agreed. the follow up is just as good.
the standard basically just looks better
Place your bets everyone, has OP ever looked at either standard?
Bets all in? Okay:
spoiler
I have not looked directly at the AT standard, just the Wikipedia article and some similar high-level explanation.
Pretty sure I have actually looked at the ActivityPub standard at times, though.
Very slow at the moment, probably due to people looking for Reddit alternatives but was fine couple of weeks ago when I first saw it. Seemed okay if you’re okay with AT Proto (it’s not that decentralised really).
Really? In what way?
Digital identities being cryptographic and independent of any one instance is huge all on it's own. The rest of it I understand less clearly, but it looks pretty modular.
See here. Basically, creating a relay for the AT protocol is extremely costly and only possible for big tech companies.
There's also this:
https://frontpage.fyi/Not sure which of the two has been around longer, but looks like frontpage is also pretty slow going.
The main difference between Threadsky and Frontpage is that Threadsky is just yet another Bluesky re-skin, it's just regular Bluesky posts presented in a reddit-like format, whereas Frontpage has its own dedicated lexicon and doesn't ingest the Bluesky firehose at all. I think Frontpage is really neat, but it has been shown little love unfortunately, it hasn't meaningfully changed in months.
There was a good discussion online between Christine Lemmer-Webber, one of the editors of the ActivityPub W3C Standard, and Bryan Newbold, protocol engineer at BlueSky.
- CLW - How Decentralized is BlueSky Really?
- BN - Reply on Bluesky and Decentralization
- CLW - Re: Re: BlueSky and Decentralization
These are long reads. But they are worth reading. Christine and Bryan agree that ATProto and ActivityPub have different design goals and so what you get from "federation" with each is different. ATProto makes a centralized index of the entire system possible, at the cost of relying on very few (practically likely one) centralized providers.
As a result, the Lemmy ecosystem, as it exists today, wouldn't be possible with ATProto. It would probably look more like Reddit, but with a "credible exit" possible as a defense against enshittification.
If Bluesky becomes federated with multiple instances, it will be just as impossible to enter as ActivityPub-based services apparently are since instance-selection is a blocker.
RIght?
;)
Yep, probably. People are just going to have to get used to it to certain degree, and to a certain degree there's going to be .world-type instances that act as a user-friendly default.
There's other issues at play, of course, which is more why I asked.
ITT: Fediverse = Ideology, ATproto = real applications
There's been a definite tinge of ideology or at least gatekeeping to some of these responses, but that's to be expected. FOSS has always had a streak of it.
It's a bit ironic to use ActivityPub to say ActivityPub has no real applications, though.