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?
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.
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/
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).
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.
There are important features that ATPro has that activity pub doesn’t. I’d prefer activity pub be the winner but they really need to improve some things. Namely, identity. Bluesky identity is more portable.
Identity was already solved with Zot aka Nomad, which is part of the Fediverse and easier to implement than ATProto.
It’s mostly been ignored because it’s just not that important to people, apparently.
Nomad is very good at what it does.
I just wish Hubzilla wasn’t a UX nightmare.
It’s not implemented in mastodon or lemmy though. I’m not saying it can’t be implemented, but it hasn’t been in any platform.
No, but the software that implements it also implements ActivityPub, so you can get nomadic identity and also still interact with the rest of the Fediverse.
We still don’t need ATProto for that. ActivityPods solves that.
ActivityPub itself is built around the principle that the server owns your identity: the best you can do is abandon an identity (i.e, your actor URL) and tell everyone else (via the
MoveActivity) that you are adopting a new identity.
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.
Bluesky should just turn on ActivityPub at this point
