I thought this was slightly funny.
Mark Zuckerberg is known these days for wearing t-shirts with Latin phrases on them, especially ones where he compares himself to Julius Caesar.
Bluesky made a shirt in the same style, but theirs says “a world without Caesars” in Latin.
https://worldwithoutcaesars.com/
As much as I hate to be that guy, it’s worth keeping in mind that BlueSky is not really practising what they preach here. The AT protocol formally allows for a kind of decentralization, but it is prohibitively expensive to run an instance, meaning that only rich folks or those who are willing to accept money from venture capitalists will be capable of actually doing so.
ActivityPub already existed when they started BlueSky. They chose to not make their protocol compatible. The reason is simple: They are a company, and they have a profit motive. ActivityPub is too democratic, and therefore hard to monetize. By now they have a bunch of crypto bro investors who want their money back. It’s better to leave your money elsewhere.
Traditionally, that’s what new major version numbers are for. IF (and I stress the “if” because I have no clue about protocol design) it turns out that AT has useful features, a merger of ideas of both ActivityPub and AT could lead to ActivityPub 2.0.
That would be somewhat similar to AMD’s proprietary Mantle leading to Vulkan (which was originally intended to launch as OpenGL 5.0).
Or non-profits that are willing to accept money from supporters.
Because AT protocol has features that are incompatible with ActivityPub, and those features are important to some users.
Which benefits does AT have in comparison to Activity pub? Except currently single point of entry/failure?
They want decentralized moderation on a centralized platform. That’s how on Bluesky, there’s an understanding that the removal of hate speech “conflicts with Bluesky’s decentralized goals”. On Mastodon, the decentralized nature is how we can give bigots the boots without them getting to whine about their freedom of expression. Bluesky manages to create a problem using the very same concept by which Mastodon solves it.
I guess this didn’t really end up being a post about the benefits of AT. Oops.
At least in Germany there is a mandatory German filter list that seems to be maintained by Bluesky themselves. They couldn’t legally operate here if they allowed holocaust denial and such.
There are minimum standards they’ll have to abide by, but that’s similar to Meta after their change of policy. It really is not enough that it should make anyone feel comfortable.
Basically big platforms can choose between making moderation expensive, minimal, or arbitrary. Bluesky is leaning into minimal, keeping the door open for most things as long as they’re legal. Reddit is leaning into arbitrary, having AI banning folks on account of upvotes. Facebook used to dabble with expensive, but have made a recent shift into minimal.
This simply will not work, some other option, probably rushed, poorly thought through and ultimately more authoritarian than an honestly constructed moderation structure would have been will be implemented when this approach ultimately fails catastrophically.
I pre-emptively post a surprised pikachu here to signify this
The fact that we don’t see this yet, and that Bluesky has accepted the amount of money they have from actors I would not want to be associated with, makes me doubt this is possible.
Even if a non-profit wanted to operate with good intentions, the expense of running an AT proto hub would eventually prove a challenge, and the non-profit would either go under or need to start looking around for money. Meanwhile people can self-host their Mastodon instance on a Raspberry Pi.
Regarding the alleged missing features of ActivityPub, I have tried and failed to understand exactly which feature is the AT proto so desperately want that they found it impossible to achieve through ActivityPub. The whole thing with having a mobile identity or whatever seems like a nothing burger to me - at the end of the day it just means that your user name is your DID number, and that web addresses can redirect towards that one. It’s hardly some technological marvel that could never have been achieved on a less centralized protocol.
There are significant differences in account portability. ActivityPub allows you to transfer your followers to a new server, but not your content.
Nothing in ActivityPub says you can’t move your content from one platform to another. It’s just that Mastodon does not have this feature at the moment.
Meanwhile, I’m not sure whether Bluesky has this feature or not, but it’s somewhat irrelevant considering the fact that there are no other platforms to move your content to. The only thing I’ve actually seen from this is that you can use an URL as your username in the front-end, though it just points towards the same DID in the backend. I struggle to see what the great achievement here is.
If this was the reasoning behind Bluesky, they could have developed a platform running on AP supporting the transfer of content between instances, and it would have been a whole lot easier than developing a whole new protocol.
Your content in ActivityPub is linked to the home instance. So for example I can’t move this post from lemmy.world to another server. I could copy/paste the content into a new post on another server, but it would be a broken piece of our conversation with no context or replies.
Also, hosting a ATProto self-instance is not as expensive as you suggest. This person did it for $150/month.
Fair - you could host a copy or a link (or a sort of combination between the two, I guess), but it wouldn’t transfer the ownership of the original post. I’m still not sure this is such a pressing feature that I accept it as the actual raison d’etre of AT proto, especially considering how it very much exists there only in theory at best. But it is interesting technology, and something they could maybe have worked with ActivityPub to try to achieve.
I’m glad to hear that maybe Bluesky is more decentralized than I suspect, but Bluesky engineer whose blog post you linked still links to his bluesky account on bsky.social. If running a separate instance is achievable, I would love to see people actually do it.
You full on misunderstand the protocol. The .bsky.social subdomain does not denote what “instance” you are on. There are no instances on atproto. That user could be self hosting all there data and still use that subdomain. It’s not mutually exclusive. Atproto is far more atomic than AP.
My understanding is that running most of BlueSky is possible on small to moderate hardware. However, running all of BlueSky requires basically cloning 100% of all the content on BlueSky (which, as of Nov 2024, was ~5 TB).
So, like, yes, one can run part of BlueSky or a clone of BlueSky which has none of the main instance’s user’s content without much trouble, but actually running an entire BlueSky stack is eventually going to become cost prohibitive.
I found this write-up to be enlightening on the subject.
Still a cool shirt tho.
Well, most people don’t read Latin, so there’s a high risk of ending up looking exactly as pretentious as the asshole one seeks to make fun of. That said, taste is individual, each for their own.
he probably wore it when visiting latin america.
That’s a fair point. If you’re concerned about people judging you, you probably wouldn’t want to be seen as a Fuckerburg fanboy.
I don’t mind people setting up for-profit businesses. After all it’s what you’re supposed to do in a capitalist society, but the issue with it is when company start putting profit before people. As long as they don’t do that I’m not bothered that they make business-minded decisions.
The real problem begins when one has to consider how to make money from a social media platform. Selling T-shirts with sick burns written in Latin is not going to work forever.
Right… isn’t the obvious response to this “holy shit, they really don’t have a business model even remotely figured out here???” which immediately leads you to the realization that everything they promise (no matter how genuine the employee making the promises is) is subject to being sacrificed at the alter of “sorry we had to monetize and make difficult decisions”.
This isn’t difficult, it is just exhausting.
What this says is that Bluesky has no idea how to make a profit off of social media ethically and they would be better off spending their time selling smart political and funny t-shirts than distracting people with a false vision of the future that is going to end up just making everybody even more cynical in the end when it inveitably enshittifies the same exact way every other for-profit social media venture has…
Nah I am good, I will put my energy into helping the fediverse grow because I know how this story goes and I can’t stand the rising headache I get from seeing it repeat endlessly. I want a different future and so I am here.