psionidesIntroduction to AT Protocol
Here is an excerpt from the offical docs for the curious:
"Why not use ActivityPub?
ActivityPub is a federated social networking technology popularized by Mastodon.
Account portability is a major reason why we chose to build a separate protocol. We consider portability to be crucial because it protects users from sudden bans, server shutdowns, and policy disagreements. Our solution for portability requires both signed data repositories and DIDs, neither of which are easy to retrofit into ActivityPub. The migration tools for ActivityPub are comparatively limited; they require the original server to provide a redirect and cannot migrate the user's previous data.
Another major reason is scalability. ActivityPub depends heavily on delivering messages between a wide network of small-to-medium sized nodes, which can cause individual nodes to be flooded with traffic and generally struggles to provide global views of activity. The AT Protocol uses aggregating applications to merge activity from the users' hosts, reducing the overall traffic and dramatically reducing the load on individual hosts.
Other smaller differences include: a different viewpoint about how schemas should be handled, a preference for domain usernames over AP's double-@ email usernames, and the goal of having large scale search and algorithmic feeds."
Relevant post by Christine Lemmer-Webber (Co-creator of ActivityPub) https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
a very opinionated piece that leads by conclusion rather than building up to it.
The main part of ATProto that is centralized is the PLC and that will eventually be made (most likely) into a consortium. PDS hosting is debatable
That being said, it should be possible to run completely independent atproto networks today. We have several dev infra setups for doing it in the ecosystem
> it should be possible to run completely independent atproto networks today
But does anyone do it? It doesn't really matter if it's /theoretically possible/ if no one actually does it.
Running an ActivityPub server is piss easy, anyone can do it on a $5 VPS or in their basement, and that's one of its big strengths.
BlackSky seems to be run by a competent dev with a high enough profile that I see his posts regularly without following him directly
Based on his progress posts it seems that ATproto is intentionally moving in the right direction and BlackSky has progressed to the point he’s asking for volunteers to move off Bluesky and try out his implementations
What is this BlackSky you're talking about?
https://www.blackskyweb.xyz - it's the black people community on Bluesky, they started first with some custom feeds and blocklists/labeller, now they have a PDS and relay, and they're planning to launch a forked version of the app and eventually have a full independent infra basically. With some extra features like option to make "internal" posts that aren't shared with the wider Bluesky but only with people on the PDS.
