I don’t quite understand a lot of the details on how the implementations work.

In what ways is AT better or worse than ActivityPub? Are there different versions of ActivityPub? Are there improvements coming to either to make them better (or compatible)?

My current understanding is

  • AT makes it easier to move accounts (according to them), but AT is controlled and maintained by BlueSky, and they are a for-profit company that can mess with the protocol in the future, which goes against the central idea of decentralized social media

What other cool technical details are there?

  • @[email protected]English
    6•1 year ago

    Well for one, if a feature is implemented in Atproto, it’ll be implemented for the entire federated network. With ActivityPub, there’s inconsistency with the features (You still need Glitch-soc if you want Mastodon with text formatting, for instance) and, while yes it’s cool that I can talk to Lemmy from my Mastodon account, it’s quite a clunky experience IMO and shouldn’t be a selling point to the regular user who just wants to post about what they’re doing.

    A technical overview of Atproto can be retrieved here.

    • @[email protected]English
      4•1 year ago

      while yes it’s cool that I can talk to Lemmy from my Mastodon account, it’s quite a clunky experience

      I do wish they were slightly more interoperable. It’s currently very hard if not impossible to discuss Mastodon posts directly within Lemmy, and likewise you can’t make a Mastodon-style post to your personal Lemmy profile. These may seem like unimportant changes, but I think much of that stems from still viewing these services from the frame of the limitations of what they are based on. They could be so much more!

      Lemmy itself has big problems with the interoperability of servers. There are two major issues I see with the way communities are structured. The first is that listed subscriber numbers are for your server only, which makes the entire ecosystem seem way less lively than it actually is, which has the effect of making it even less so. Subscriber numbers should be fed in from a community’s home server.

      The second is that there are many redundant communities, which makes it difficult for onboarding new users. There should be some way to group like-communities into super-groups based on topics. That way community leaders have the ability to easily aggregate similar content, rather than leaving it to the user to figure out, and you could opt-out as a user by simply not subscribing to the super-group community.