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First of all, the ActivityPub system is not suited to something like Misskey, which flows at lightning speed.
It was originally designed to connect blogs, small-scale SNSs, and wikis.
How can it handle the TL hell where tens of thousands of requests fly in per second?
It’s based on the idea that it would be nice if various small services could send each other updates, so it’s quite costly.
It sounds a bit like they drank too much ATproto coolaid, which is designed for “firehose” like feeds, but does so at the expense of horizontal scalability, making Bluesky a near natural monopoly on the protocol.
May the best team win.
I’m not sure if trading in these things is very helpful, it probably doesn’t get us all the way. But I can empathize. I feel some nostalgia for the times when I ran mostly text based communication on a potato. And that’s not how any of the more modern tech works. But there’s an entire complicated story behind it.
How can the best team win when ATproto is structurally giving Bluesky an advantage over any possible other team? The best solution is not to play such a rigged game.
ATproto and ActivityPub are not in a competition, despite many people having this wrong impression. ATproto ultimatly tries to solve a different problem than ActivityPub.
ATproto tries to make the influencer type social media (many follow a few) more robust by giving those influencers better data ownership and outsourcing moderation to community operated filters. At least in theory, as most of it didn’t work out with Bluesky dominating everything and few others interested in becoming part of it.
ActivityPub ultimatly tries to solve the social network problem where network effects lead to large centralized walled gardens like Facebook or Reddit locking in users. The overall design is thus modeled on that problem and it isn’t particularly suited to cater to social media influencers with large amounts of followers.
Sure. I was coming from a different perspective. We have all these competing protocols, I’ve used Matrix, XMPP, eMail, several dialects of AP and there’s a bunch more out there (Nostr, …), and a plethora of different and/or overlapping use-cases. My definition of a “win” would be to connect people. In a meaningful way and to contribute to their lives. Make it easy to participate and all these things. I don’t really care that much about the exact protocol, that’s just a tool to achieve some goal.
I think it’s way more important what we build with these things. My ideal platform would do away with the unhealthy social media dynamics we’ve inherited. It’d be full of people discussing hobby projects, share their travel stories and what’s important to them. Have answers to weird computer problems… Politics would be more than a shouting match. It’d empower people to be constructive while talking to each other. I think the protocol is crucial to lay out the groundworks for that, but ultimately it is not in itself the standard by which we measure our success.
I never thought about it this way. Probably that’s why Mastodon was always struggling with discovery, while on the other hand federation on the Threadiverse works quite well
Mastdon’s discoverability issues are as political as they are technical. It fundamentally requires some aggregating and process of people’s data, something Mastodon users are infamously opposed to. Not for entirely illegitimate reasons, but the extent some go to oppose it is troubling.
Ah, that makes sense. I assume than that discoverability is better on Sharkey and other key forks?
Maybe? You’d have to ask someone who’s used them.
I’ve actually never used anything beyond my basic mastodon.social account.
I’m hoping to finally be able to move of it if FEP-1580 goes anywhere: https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/115376513498494866
Let’s hope!