Despite understandable misgivings with ATProto due to its corporate origins and its architecture lending itself to centralization, it’s still open source. Moreover, it serves a different purpose compared to ActivityPub, in that it specifically aims to enable and support larger scale social networks.

In a way, ATProto could be complementary to ActivityPub, but for this to be the case, there needs to be more shared understanding between both communities. People working on both recognize the faults in existing social media, and aim to address them in different ways.

ATProto provides an opportunity to break down big social media enclosures with data portability and a similar vibe to big social media, but with more individual empowerment to adjust what they see. The latter point is a commonality with ActivityPub, but ActivityPub provides a different angle of breaking the big social media enclosures.

Where ATProto serves the interests of those into big social media vibes, ActivityPub serves the interests of those into small social media vibes. In other words, ATProto scales up, where ActivityPub scales down.

ActivityPub is arguably a better protocol for both individual and “small” group empowerment, as it can enable otherwise less active, small platforms to connect and ensure there’s always some level of activity to encourage people to come back. Think of old forums that, on their own, gradually faded out as people stopped visiting and posting for more active online communities. ActivityPub can serve as a buffer against that, to some degree.

Together, both protocols could provide a better, open social web, and perhaps effectively topple big social media enclosures. After all, who wouldn’t like to see the web without Meta/Facebook and Twitter/X?

TL;DR: ATProto/ActivityPub have a common foe in big social media enclosures like Meta/Facebook and Twitter/X and would be better served working together to erode their influence.

  • Skull giverEnglish
    2•6 days ago

    AKAIK, activitypub (on mastodon) only requests and receives content from individual users that have been followed by someone on the local instance, it wouldn’t load all of bluesky at once, it would just need to have an up to date database of bluesky’s users so they are easily searchable. With that model, even crappy PC’s can interact with the mega servers.

    Yes, but that’s how you end up with the “I don’t have anyone to follow” situation that people left Mastodon for during the first wave of the Twitter collapse. Now Mastodon has a feed of sorts, but for small servers (I host my own) you have to know the accounts of the people you want to follow, nothing will show up organically.

    With the OP’s point of ATProto being open-source, I assume the thrust of the argument is that at done point there would be a community hosted instance, which were it compatible, I think most activitypub se rvers would gladly federate with.

    You can run your own ATProto servers but it the millions of accounts I think maybe 500 to a 1000 users aren’t on the Bluesky instance. You’ll have to ask the people who complained.

    Ideally there doesn’t need to be any, as the conglomeration of all smaller instances should be able to act as a large server. Unfortunately as it currently stands, the UI of most fediverse software makes interacting with that wider pool more difficult than it needs to be, and thus punishes smaller Mastodon servers with more difficult discovery of interesting topics or people to follow. But I think that can be overcome simply with better UI design.

    From my attempts of convincing people to give Mastodon a try, the federation aspect confuses and scares the normal user. It’s also what taught me that most people don’t seem to realise that you can read your Gmail email without downloading the Gmail app. And that most people don’t realise that mail servers can and will refuse email from other servers as they see fit. My expectations about how well-informed people who email every day are about the core concepts of email were way to high. It’s stupid but it explains a lot of stupid questions I’ve heard of the years.

    A large part of the problem is UX, following someone on another server is a massive hurdle that could be overcome (just register a web protocol so we can make links targeting web-activitypub:follow:user@domain, that way websites and apps can follow people without having to enter your username when you click follow…) but change is slow and there are many different projects that all have their own challenges to overcome.

    Again, I think that’s a UI problem. I don’t use mastodon myself because of it, as I find it difficult to find people that interest me. However, Lemmy’s use of Topics, and more critically, the existence of Lemmyverse.net which searches across all instances, make finding interesting things possible regardless of the size of your home instance. It’s criminal that that functionality is not a native feature in the standard lemmy Ui, and I’m not aware of anything similar for mastodon.

    ActivityPub just brings a lot of overhead. Especially with the way Lemmy uses it, which ensures that you actually get a somewhat view or the current replies on a post. My Lemmy server is constantly spiking in CPU usage because I’ve joined a few larger Lemmy instances. There’s a constant steam of opening and closing HTTPS sockets, constant TLS key exchanges, and often minutes of latency submitting posts in burst. This is tough to optimise for without reaching out and coming to an agreement with every other server owner. ActivityPub is way more efficient for small communities than ATProto ever will be (because it doesn’t take long to cache all keys and only the involved servers gain the information they need), but for larger servers that provide a more “social media” feel, you need to employ active scrapers.

    As for the lemmyverse.net thing: you can’t build that into Lemmy without sacrificing some level of independence. A fresh Lemmy server doesn’t know about any other Lemmy servers so it can’t suggest anything. You could add support for third party Lemmy directory services, but then the server owner of lemmyverse gets to decide what servers get to see what other servers out or the gate. Sounds like a good feature for the Lemmy devs to consider, but I’m not sure if they’d accept the pull request without discussing this beforehand. Plus, someone will have to update every Lemmy app as well (and apps can already integrate with lemmyverse of course).

    • @[email protected]English
      2•6 days ago

      Yes, but that’s how you end up with the “I don’t have anyone to follow” situation that people left Mastodon for during the first wave of the Twitter collapse.

      The vast majority of people landed on the largest severs, where there was a ton of chatter in both the Local and Global feeds. They couldn’t find anyone because they were accustomed to using search to find connections, and Mastodon’s search is so tightly locked down that it’s borderline impossible to find who or what you’re looking for. The idea of checking other feeds didn’t even seem to occur to many people – something that I, as an avid “what’s that button do?” user, find totally bizarre, but seems to be rather standard for most people interacting with new things.

      If the default view had been Local or something, the story could have been very different.

      • Skull giverEnglish
        2•6 days ago

        The problems that plagues Mastodon at the time have all been fixed as far as I know, but it’s too late now. Other, more difficult problems remain, like the inconsistencies between server on how many likes/comments a post has and the inevitable perception that you need to create an account on every server to follow people because the follow button doesn’t work by itself even if you’re logged into your account in another tab.

        People don’t join a social media platform to go on an adventure and see what every button does. They came looking for a new Twitter rather than a new experience and Mastodon, and kind of still is, a bad Twitter. It’s a great Mastodon, but that’s just not what most people were after.