@_elena I keep asking for this "decentralized" protocol to help me move off of all infrastructure controlled by the Bluesky corporation, and I keep getting the answer "well…so…uh…actually…"

Unfortunately I'm not waiting around for the "exit from evil billionaire control" scenario Jay Graber talked about a year ago or whatever, because that's already happened. So if I can't use ATProto without Bluesky, I guess I won't use ATProto. 🤷🏻‍♂️

@jaredwhite I noticed your posts Jared… and I was following with curiosity the replies. It doesn’t look good.

What worries me is that here in Europe advocacy for the open social web groups the two protocols together (ATProto and ActivityPub).

Also: European politicians and media organizations are gravitating towards Bluesky / ATproto and mostly ignoring the Fediverse…

@_elena Well…I would say it's "complicated".

I could envision a world where every major country or socioeconomic region has its own ATProto-based social network, because they have the resources to run that kind of infrastructure at scale. Not saying I like the idea, but that seems to be how ATProto was structured. Several *large enterprises* could run services which interoperate.

That's quite different from ActivityPub where you can run a decent social networking instance off a Raspberry Pi. 😄

@jaredwhite totally. BTW did you get an answer to your question yesterday?

I also wonder if there are ATProto equivalents to Phanpy or masto-fe... you know, web clients that allow you to log in with your credentials instead of going to bsky.app

Yes, there are lots of different web and mobile clients. I use blacksky.community, which also has its own appview, so am almost completely independent of Bluesky infrastructure. @stefan mentioned Red Dwarf, and I think there are a handful of others that also allow you to select an appview (very analagous to how phanpy lets you choose an instance) so also allow almost complete independence.

In terms of your initial question, I think that many people (including me!) find a multiple-identity approach very valuable for a variety of reasons. That said, today's ActivityPub-based software doesn't handle multiple identities any better than ATProto-based software. So like so many other things with fedi, it's a potential strength that hasn't been leveraged.

@_elena @jaredwhite

Here's a conveniently-timed article looking at doing things completely independent of Bluesky - https://mia.leaflet.pub/3mhw3hzwtn224

@stefan @_elena @jaredwhite

@jdp23 Looks a bit involved. Interesting read, though, thank you for sharing!

@_elena @jaredwhite

Oh yeah, it's definitely at the duct tape and baling wire stage in general -- @jaredwhite is very right that right now Blacksky is the only reasonably-mature mostly-independent microblogging-focused tech stack. (Blacksky still uses Bluesky's PLC directory, although they do have a mirror that could if necessary fall back on; also they don't have their own mobile app yet, and still use some of Bluesky's moderation services.)

@stefan @_elena

@jdp23 Are they also using Bluesky's servers for DMs, since those are stored off-protocol?

Or do non-Bluesky AppViews just don't have DMs? (Or whichever part of the stack is responsible for that.)

@jaredwhite @_elena