Last month, I helped release the Resonant Computing Manifesto, which laid out a vision for technology that empowers users rather than extracting from them. The response was gratifying—people are genuinely hungry for an alternative to the current enshittification trajectory of tech. But the most common piece of feedback we got was some version of: “Okay, this sounds great, but how do I actually build this?”
It’s a fair question. Manifestos are cheap if they don’t connect to reality.
So here’s my answer, at least for anything involving social identity: build on the ATProtocol. It’s the only available system today that actually delivers on the resonant computing principles, and it’s ready to use right now.
I don’t really care what protocol is used, the best one will eventually win and whatever it ends up being will be mostly transparent to the user, just like (and I may be dating myself here) IMAP eventually became the standard way to interact with email and POP just got essentially forgotten despite starting out as the universal and most popular choice. Even SMTP is technically just one extremely popular way to reliably transfer email, but even in that case there used to be others like UUCP and you could make an argument that other significant protocols are involved in a modern email stack now too. UUCP made sense at the time, but eventually was recognized to be a stupid and non-scalable design and the superior protocol won out. Great. Email is still email.
What I care about is having my data and account on a server that I can choose and trust or potentially even control. With Bluesky, that is currently quite hard and impractical, although gradually getting slightly easier. With the Fediverse it is foundational, and if I cared enough about it, I’d already be able to be running my own without issue, because that’s what the Fediverse is explicitly about. Again, I don’t care what protocol I’m or what protocol it’s using, I do care what network I’m on, and what features it has, and what goals it has, and what priorities it has, and on that basis I would rather be part of the Fediverse, whether it’s using ActivityPub or ATProto or something else.
Bluesky is for the centralized people to go and centralize their hearts out. Maybe ATProto won’t be permanently afflicted by their tolerance for centralizing things, time will tell, but it’s the network and the organizations and the development directions I’m interested in, not the protocol itself. May the best protocol win.
Activitypub.
Still waiting patiently to see whether venture capital eventually turns Bluesky to shit despite all the fancy words, or whether it eventually grows up and starts federating with the rest of us.
Notice the quote says “build on the ATProtocol”, not “build on BlueSky”. It could be argued that the more this is done the less defacto power BlueSky will have. And people are doing it. Some examples are listed in the Wikipedia article, but there are more.
