AkumuMay 9, 2023
Riley Testut 

It sucks reading all the Mastodon vs Bluesky takes because the whole *point* of decentralized social media was that it didn’t have to be a zero-sum game. Yes Mastodon is more nerdy and yes Bluesky is more “normal”, but if they all used ActivityPub then everyone could win!

But instead of contributing to the open social web, Bluesky decided to fork the ecosystem with their own proprietary protocol :/ And now we’re headed for the same siloed world as before

May 8, 2023 at 3:57pmIvory for iOS
Show threadRiley Testut May 8, 2023
It’s like if Adobe introduced Flash *after* we standardized HTML5, and justified it by saying “it makes playing online games easier,” and everyone jumped on board for that one reason
Show threadelle mundyMay 8, 2023
@rileytestut to be fair, it took apple, the largest company in human history, pushing html5 and banning flash from its massively popular closed OS with its own exclusive browser engine, to kill off flash
Show threadSiguzaMay 8, 2023
@rileytestut it all starts to make a lot more sense when you consider large groups of people being dragged there by "influencers" who want an algorithm to game, and who want to monetise social media.
Show threadelle mundyMay 8, 2023
@rileytestut what if atproto and activitypub move towards each other and overlap increasingly to the point of mergeability/bridgeability
Show threadRiley Testut May 8, 2023
@exchgr realistically, I doubt we’d see true convergence. Just shims that provide base-level functionality like following across services, but without sending back replies/likes/interactions
Show threadJari PennanenMay 8, 2023

@rileytestut There is a difference with the two:

ActivityPub is built as 1-to-1, i.e. content goes to your followers primarily via follower lists. This is a reason why some are hostile to search here because connections are point-to-piont.

Bluesky's protocol is one-to-many and everything is public. It prioritizes sending content to a big-data-gathering indexer where everything is searchable.

This simple difference makes a huge change in how they can be implemented and scaled.

Show threadRiley Testut May 8, 2023

@Ciantic I understand they have different strengths, but proprietary protocols always have strengths over their open equivalents for certain use cases; it’s whether those differences are worth splitting the ecosystem vs slowly improving the standards (e.g. improving HTML5 to support games)

I personally think if Bluesky was conceived today, they’d just adopt ActivityPub; instead we’re seeing the sunk-cost fallacy play out because they already had been working on AT Protocol (and it may win)

Show threadJari PennanenMay 8, 2023

@rileytestut I agree that everything Bluesky wants could have been done with little extensions or improvements on ActivityPub: Consent to search, index, sign messages, etc. Even the handle formats could have been redecided because they are not part of ActivityPub.

Currently AP doesn't require you to sign messages (only HTTP header signatures are required). In Bluesky it's a requirement because you have to trust middle servers like BGS to provide the messages on behalf of the original server.

Show threadJeffMay 8, 2023
@rileytestut Yes! And right now the only benefit I’m seeing is that the “conversation” is much better there than on Mastodon. Once they open it up, what makes it any better other than the initial signup process? I just don’t get why folks would want that one entity decides all situation again.
Show threadJeffMay 8, 2023
@rileytestut Plus, being from the Chicago Suburbs, it’s “Blue-Skee” not “Blue-Sky”. Gitchew a couple too tree a doze invites ova here HEY!
Show threadJuan VillelaMay 8, 2023
@rileytestut ActivityPub is open sourced. No matter how hard they try to sell this AT protocol as the future of social media and the open web, they are still a for-profit organization. And they can’t control—which they need—an open standard. They simply changed the wall to a fence, but it’s still a walled garden. It’s what they want.