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?
ha, no… bluesky is not open to federation. they control the only router and do not allow connectivity to routers not controlled by them.
there isnt a single non-bluesky controlled instance that can federate natively with bluesky.
bluesky is just twitter with a little more user-controllable data sourcing. not that theres anything wrong with that, but its certainly not a part of any federation.
e. suggested reading: https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
And they are either in for one of the following:
- a $30 Million lesson where they learn that they will have to reinvent ActivityPub in order to be “properly” decentralized
- a rug pull where they come up with a second relay like Bluesky but fork to give exclusive access for large institutions and the enterprise.
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.
good luck to them. the router piece is incredibly top heavy and not designed for horizontal scaling.
Yep. What do you think the chances are you could write something that does the job of the router and app view, but in a totally off-standard, more point-to-point way?
In the meanwhile, it’s just a matter of bridging, I guess.
It’s a good blog post, thanks. I made a quick summery elsewhere in the thread.
It’s really unfortunate that we’ve ended up with two populated protocols for federation, both of which have a major flaw. In our case, it’s no established support for moving accounts. In theirs, its a component that’s so bulky the federatability is questionable (and no federated DMs).
both of which have a major flaw
What major flaw do you believe ActivityPub has?
They mentioned the flaws of both platforms.
In our case, it’s no established support for moving accounts.
This is such a well written piece, it’s closer to a serious article than a blogpost
looks better
What do you mean?
than ActivityPub
ActivityPub is decentralised. AT has a centralised index. They’re not comparable.
the standard basically just looks better
Place your bets everyone, has OP ever looked at either standard?
Very slow at the moment, probably due to people looking for Reddit alternatives but was fine couple of weeks ago when I first saw it. Seemed okay if you’re okay with AT Proto (it’s not that decentralised really).
There’s also this:
https://frontpage.fyi/
Not sure which of the two has been around longer, but looks like frontpage is also pretty slow going.
The main difference between Threadsky and Frontpage is that Threadsky is just yet another Bluesky re-skin, it’s just regular Bluesky posts presented in a reddit-like format, whereas Frontpage has its own dedicated lexicon and doesn’t ingest the Bluesky firehose at all. I think Frontpage is really neat, but it has been shown little love unfortunately, it hasn’t meaningfully changed in months.
Really? In what way?
Digital identities being cryptographic and independent of any one instance is huge all on it’s own. The rest of it I understand less clearly, but it looks pretty modular.
See here. Basically, creating a relay for the AT protocol is extremely costly and only possible for big tech companies.
Thank you!
TL;DR, the relay bit works as a completely connected network topology, and has the associated quadratic growth issues, which renders it, like you said, hard to host.
Also nasty: Direct messages are just not federated.
Other things are or were at the time of writing janky, but nothing else is quite that egregious. The author is working on a separate project, and recommends this idea as a solution for portable identity on ActivityPub; here’s what “object capability” means in the context.
The data is not centralized, but everyone is using the same aggravation aggregation service (indexer) to access the data.
There was a good discussion online between Christine Lemmer-Webber, one of the editors of the ActivityPub W3C Standard, and Bryan Newbold, protocol engineer at BlueSky.
- CLW - How Decentralized is BlueSky Really?
- BN - Reply on Bluesky and Decentralization
- CLW - Re: Re: BlueSky and Decentralization
These are long reads. But they are worth reading. Christine and Bryan agree that ATProto and ActivityPub have different design goals and so what you get from “federation” with each is different. ATProto makes a centralized index of the entire system possible, at the cost of relying on very few (practically likely one) centralized providers.
As a result, the Lemmy ecosystem, as it exists today, wouldn’t be possible with ATProto. It would probably look more like Reddit, but with a “credible exit” possible as a defense against enshittification.
