I’d like to hijack the top comment to say that despite news like these, a friend of mine who’s been involved with development (interacted with developers, looked at code…) says that recent updates have made the ATProto service stack much more optimized and accessible. There’s also quite a few “Atmosphere” services already, such as leaflet.pub
And I’m gonna be honest most implementations of ActivityPub I’ve seen so far have felt more like a normal social media with a “talk to other servers!” gimmick
Their model (AT Protocol) relies on a central, authoritative … ‘Relay’, that all ‘federated’ users and posts on federated PDS (personal data servers) must go through, to actually reach the ‘AppView’, ie, what all other people/users can actually see.
So, this is not a many to many, tangled spider web of connections, the way lemmy, and other parts of the actual fediverse are.
It is a top down hierarchy, a pyramid.
And Bluesky runs the Relay, the chokepoint.
If Bluesky cuts off the PDS your account is on, everyone on it is now gone.
The actual fediverse, Mastadon, Lemmy, etc, runs on ActivityPub.
In that model… every instance is essentially self contained, and every instance that is federated communicates with every other instance that is federated.
Each instance can decide what other instances they want to federate with… and users on each instance can personally block even more other users, communities, or entire instances if they choose to, but that only effects what that particular user sees.
That is what you call decentralized, approaching, or also having elements of being ‘distributed’.
Now, of course, thats a bit simplified, the AppView is actually more complex than that, the ‘Relay’ is in actuality a bunch of different machines in different physical locations…
… but it still acts as a monolithic layer, a gate keeper, controlled by a board of directors.
Is anybody else running their own Relay yet?
Thats a genuine question, I totally wrote off BlueSky long ago.
If not, this is all still fundamentally the same.
If you just see ActivityPub as ‘normal social media that can talk to other servers’… you don’t get it.
There’s no single centralized chokepoint that is under corporate control.
Costs of running your own ActPub instance are generally not exhorbitantly expensive, thus the entire paradigm is more ‘small d’ democratic, has a lower barrier to entry and is thus more practically distributable.
From what I could find on my own with a couple minutes of research (currently at school) I know there’s at least two independent relays active, the WhiteWind one and the BlackSky one. There’s a blogpost written by the WhiteWind developers about the performance costs of running a Relay, and checking it out again I see they mention the recent update to improve performance at the top of the page now.
I said this before but since learning how they work on a conceptual surface level I’ve liked and felt more optimistic about ATProto than ActivityPub. I think I misspoke in the way I described how I felt about the Fediverse and gave the wrong idea about what I think. But I don’t want to make this reply longer than it has to be.
I’m not going to say either is better than the other, from what I can tell it’s just two different models of decentralization that are radically different, but I like ATProto’s approach more
What I am going to say though is that I do wish there were more ATProto based services, and I find it odd how ATProto and Bluesky have not seen the same sprawl of clients and services ActivityPub has, but that may just be a question of age (as iirc AP is much older than ATProto). Bluesky’s got its fair share of Clients but AP honestly puts it to shame, I genuinely wonder why.
I’d like to hijack the top comment to say that despite news like these, a friend of mine who’s been involved with development (interacted with developers, looked at code…) says that recent updates have made the ATProto service stack much more optimized and accessible. There’s also quite a few “Atmosphere” services already, such as leaflet.pub
And I’m gonna be honest most implementations of ActivityPub I’ve seen so far have felt more like a normal social media with a “talk to other servers!” gimmick
TIL my comment is the top comment.
But the ATProto architecture is still too fundamentally centralized, and thus easily censorable.
Quoting myself from nearly a year ago:
Now, of course, thats a bit simplified, the AppView is actually more complex than that, the ‘Relay’ is in actuality a bunch of different machines in different physical locations…
… but it still acts as a monolithic layer, a gate keeper, controlled by a board of directors.
Is anybody else running their own Relay yet?
Thats a genuine question, I totally wrote off BlueSky long ago.
If not, this is all still fundamentally the same.
If you just see ActivityPub as ‘normal social media that can talk to other servers’… you don’t get it.
There’s no single centralized chokepoint that is under corporate control.
Costs of running your own ActPub instance are generally not exhorbitantly expensive, thus the entire paradigm is more ‘small d’ democratic, has a lower barrier to entry and is thus more practically distributable.
From what I could find on my own with a couple minutes of research (currently at school) I know there’s at least two independent relays active, the WhiteWind one and the BlackSky one. There’s a blogpost written by the WhiteWind developers about the performance costs of running a Relay, and checking it out again I see they mention the recent update to improve performance at the top of the page now.
I said this before but since learning how they work on a conceptual surface level I’ve liked and felt more optimistic about ATProto than ActivityPub. I think I misspoke in the way I described how I felt about the Fediverse and gave the wrong idea about what I think. But I don’t want to make this reply longer than it has to be.
I’m not going to say either is better than the other, from what I can tell it’s just two different models of decentralization that are radically different, but I like ATProto’s approach more What I am going to say though is that I do wish there were more ATProto based services, and I find it odd how ATProto and Bluesky have not seen the same sprawl of clients and services ActivityPub has, but that may just be a question of age (as iirc AP is much older than ATProto). Bluesky’s got its fair share of Clients but AP honestly puts it to shame, I genuinely wonder why.
At some point, hopefully, the users will shape the social media platforms instead of the other way around.