Bluesky, which uses it, has been opened to federation now, and the standard basically just looks better than ActivityPub. Has anyone heard about a project to make a Lemmy-style “link aggregator” service on it?
There are important features that ATPro has that activity pub doesn’t. I’d prefer activity pub be the winner but they really need to improve some things. Namely, identity. Bluesky identity is more portable.
Identity was already solved with Zot aka Nomad, which is part of the Fediverse and easier to implement than ATProto.
It’s mostly been ignored because it’s just not that important to people, apparently.
It’s not implemented in mastodon or lemmy though. I’m not saying it can’t be implemented, but it hasn’t been in any platform.
We still don’t need ATProto for that. ActivityPods solves that.
ActivityPub itself is built around the principle that the server owns your identity: the best you can do is abandon an identity (i.e, your actor URL) and tell everyone else (via the Move Activity) that you are adopting a new identity.
The move activity ain’t a great solution. We need federated identity or else ux will continue to lag. When I want to move servers, I can set the move activity but there’s no guarantee my followers will subscribe to the new account. It’s bad ux. Mass adoption is not going to happen with that kind of flow.
Activity Pods is cool bit not implemented on mastodon.
We need federated identity or else ux will continue to lag
What I am saying is that the ActivityPub protocol is inherently built towards a server-centric system, where identities are owned by the server. Go read the spec: even the “Client-to-Server” specification assumes that the server owns the keys and dictates that the client (i.e, users) must do everything through the API provided by the server (i.e, the client’s outbox).
Anything that is built with a design where the client owns the keys may even be able to interoperate with ActivityPub, but is not ActivityPub.
Activity Pods is cool bit not implemented on mastodon.
It’s the other way around. We shouldn’t be looking for “Mastodon on ActivityPods”, but “ActivityPods applications that can talk with Mastodon servers”, and those do exist.
There is also the consideration that ATPro has a community that’s both larger and less technical, so it would be harder to move them here than the other way around. I’m thinking the direction to go might be ActivityPub servers that can route things between ATPro personal data stores, but obviously I’m still learning.
