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I'm betting on ATProto

brittanyellich.com

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Re: I'm betting on ATProto

#51

Post by gzread »

manifoldgeo wrote: post #22

I'd be curious to see how ATProto stacks up against ActivityPub in the long run. I was very excited by the prospects of Mastodon, PeerTube, and a few other Fediverse apps. I even started implementing my own ActivityPub library based on their RFC before I fizzled out. But, the Fediverse never really seemed to take off in the mainstream. Mozilla launched their own mastodon instance around 2023 and then closed it in 202…

FYI the activitypub RFC won't actually help you. What you have to do is copy how Mastodon actually communicates with other copies of itself. If you base your work on the RFC, it won't actually communicate with Mastodon or with all the other software that pretends to be Mastodon.

Re: I'm betting on ATProto

#52

Post by gzread »

esbranson wrote: post #29
manifoldgeo wrote: post #22

I'd be curious to see how ATProto stacks up against ActivityPub in the long run. I was very excited by the prospects of Mastodon, PeerTube, and a few other Fediverse apps. I even started implementing my own ActivityPub library based on their RFC before I fizzled out. But, the Fediverse never really seemed to take off in the mainstream. Mozilla launched their own mastodon instance around 2023 and then closed it in 202…

The Fediverse did take off. Then large numbers of influential people got banned by randos and realized how much better and reliable (non-profit or not) corporate censors are.

How can you be banned from the fediverse?

Re: I'm betting on ATProto

#53

Post by ninjagoo »

Not trustworthy. The providers mentioned in the article, blacksky and bluesky, presumably the most visible ones, do not allow signups with anonymous email providers even though they make you pass a human verification step.

The link in the article for Blacksky (blackskyweb.xyz) has a dark pattern that attempts to get you sign up for bluesky instead of blacksky. Odd.

The bigger issue is funding - currently appears to be VC funded (seed round 2023, Series A 2024), so they'll want a return at some point. Voilà, enshittification.

The biggest selling point - portable identity - is a mirage because the current providers do not give you the cryptographic keys to your identity. So they can simply lock you down, and your 'identity' is done.

Re: I'm betting on ATProto

#54

Post by ninjagoo »

verdverm wrote: post #36
garethsprice wrote: post #33

How does ATProto solve the problems that the last 10–20 years have shown seem intrinsic to all social media once it hits a certain scale? For example: A simple simulation of social networks rapidly reproduced three well-documented dysfunctions: partisan echo chambers, concentrated influence among a small elite, and amplification of polarized voices - creating a "social media prism" that distorts political discourse.…

The credible exit allows for real competition. In other words you can own your identity and data, apps store content in your database, and you can swap out apps that enshittify, eg. there are many alternative clients for bluesky data. The design of feeds (algos) and labellers (moderation) is unique and one of the best parts of the protocol. There are also interesting applications for inter-app features, a double edge…

> The credible exit allows for real competition

This is a mirage. The ATProto providers don't give you the cryptographic keys to your identity, so if they lock down your account, you can't migrate.

Re: I'm betting on ATProto

#55

Post by verdverm »

rchaud wrote: post #39

Isn't this just reinventing the wheel of a website, an email list and a message board? Are the scientists referenced in this article really so averse to having a website or corresponding via email that they need a social media instance to chat with every Tom, Dick and Harry that can't put up with the friction of clicking a mailto: link? How did that go during Covid, when everyone on Twitter suddenly became an infecti…

https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers

This article does a good job of explaining some nuanced differences. Tl;dr - ATProto (public data) can be viewed as a distributed event bus that anyone can plug-n-play into. It's a good design imo

Re: I'm betting on ATProto

#56

Post by verdverm »

ninjagoo wrote: post #54
verdverm wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The credible exit allows for real competition. In other words you can own your identity and data, apps store content in your database, and you can swap out apps that enshittify, eg. there are many alternative clients for bluesky data. The design of feeds (algos) and labellers (moderation) is unique and one of the best parts of the protocol. There are also interesting applications for inter-app features, a double edge…

> The credible exit allows for real competition This is a mirage. The ATProto providers don't give you the cryptographic keys to your identity, so if they lock down your account, you can't migrate.

While it is not the default for good reason (onboarding ux), you can establish your own keys and prevent that lock down.

Here is one of many sites that help users de-risk, backup, and migrate: https://pdsmoover.com/

Re: I'm betting on ATProto

#57

Post by ninjagoo »

garethsprice wrote: post #33

How does ATProto solve the problems that the last 10–20 years have shown seem intrinsic to all social media once it hits a certain scale? For example: A simple simulation of social networks rapidly reproduced three well-documented dysfunctions: partisan echo chambers, concentrated influence among a small elite, and amplification of polarized voices - creating a "social media prism" that distorts political discourse.…

> How does ATProto solve the problems that the last 10–20 years have shown seem intrinsic to all social media once it hits a certain scale?

It doesn't. There is currently no single design that eliminates all the major pathologies at once. Social media harms come from a mix of business incentives, ranking systems, scale, moderation burdens, and power concentration, so fixing one layer does not automatically fix the rest. Recent research on decentralized protocols shows that they aim to redistribute power and user agency, but they also face governance problems and risks of power re-concentrating at key decision points (see the discussion section in [1]).

[1] https://arxiv.org/html/2505.22962v1

Re: I'm betting on ATProto

#58

Post by verdverm »

ninjagoo wrote: post #53

Not trustworthy. The providers mentioned in the article, blacksky and bluesky, presumably the most visible ones, do not allow signups with anonymous email providers even though they make you pass a human verification step. The link in the article for Blacksky (blackskyweb.xyz) has a dark pattern that attempts to get you sign up for bluesky instead of blacksky. Odd. The bigger issue is funding - currently appears to b…

> The biggest selling point - portable identity - is a mirage because the current providers do not give you the cryptographic keys to your identity. So they can simply lock you down, and your 'identity' is done.

Here is one of many sites that help users de-risk, backup, and migrate: https://pdsmoover.com/

Re: I'm betting on ATProto

#59

Post by pastel8739 »

apitman wrote: post #32

> Social media was supposed to connect us, but most of it has turned into ads, division, and loneliness. I'm betting on ATProto as a way to fix that I disagree with the premise here. I think the core mechanics of social media, ie instant communication between random strangers about random topics, creates toxic interactions regardless of whether it's manipulated by engagement algorithms. Some of the most toxic convers…

This _isn’t_ the core mechanism of social media. When social media took off, Facebook and Instagram that really did allow you to connect with people that you knew from real life. Twitter was different, and more like microblogging, but I still see the real value of social media to be what the un-shitty versions of Facebook and Instagram were.

Re: I'm betting on ATProto

#60

Post by conception »

pastel8739 wrote: post #59
apitman wrote: post #32

> Social media was supposed to connect us, but most of it has turned into ads, division, and loneliness. I'm betting on ATProto as a way to fix that I disagree with the premise here. I think the core mechanics of social media, ie instant communication between random strangers about random topics, creates toxic interactions regardless of whether it's manipulated by engagement algorithms. Some of the most toxic convers…

This _isn’t_ the core mechanism of social media. When social media took off, Facebook and Instagram that really did allow you to connect with people that you knew from real life. Twitter was different, and more like microblogging, but I still see the real value of social media to be what the un-shitty versions of Facebook and Instagram were.

Twitter was amazing, not because of people microblogging about breakfast, but because it gave people/companies/orgs a way to interact directly with their audience. If you want to know what Kix cereal had to say - you could follow Kix.
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