Just want to add that the AT Protocol IETF working group has been formed, and the PLC directory independent organization and board has officially been established. I’m at the closing talk for this years Atmosphere Conference as I write this and it’s really an incredible community of devs.
I'm excited to see communities of developers working to build things that are meaningful and matter to regular people, which ATProto seems to have more of than some other ecosystems in decent tech land. And where else could you attend an awesome workshop on "Hospicing Social Media?"
Since this re-surfaced from the second chance queue, this is a good place to say they just announced the first and very important steps to an independent PLC directory: https://martianbase.net/@mackuba/116314877708269740
I can really get behind this positive take on ATProto and the ecosystem. I know there was early criticism, but much of that stems from the project taking a fairly long-term viewpoint early on, and then having to work their way towards fulfilling that. We're now at that point, and the model looks great.
I still don’t think the model is quite great until the bandwidth problem is solved in a way that doesn’t make it prohibitively expensive for alternative appview hosting.
It’s the one part of the whole system I think needs a lot of work.
> It's not enough for the people who run a service to be good people – they also have to take steps to insulate themselves (and their successors) from the kind of drip-drip-drip rationalizations that turn a series of small ethical waivers into a cumulative avalanche of pure wickedness
I completely disagree with this guy. No amount of process or protocol can be a substitute for an actually decent organization culture; without the latter, everything falls apart no matter how good the former is.
I agree; and whatever you think that is good can possibly be used against you. This is why I think ATProto is possibly dangerous, it makes Big Brother's job easier, as opposed to how ActivityPub does it.
What's the trade-off between this and ActivityPub?
I might be being cynical but I think I've seen this story play out before. Did Bluesky genuinely believe that AP wouldn't work for their use-case, or did they want to own the protocol?
A couple of pretty good reasons (except the one about lexicons IMHO), but I don’t think it’s reasonable to believe the maker of a 15th standard was “right” about not using the previous 14s. As far as I understand, all the use cases described in OP’s article can be fulfilled with ActivityPub.
I’d love to see an article showing use cases in both AtProto and ActivityPub and showing why AtProto is the superior choice.
(To me, the hype for AT protocol vs. ActivityPub feels like the hype for DevEnv vs. Nix – I’m slightly upset that the latter isn’t taking off because the former decides to do its own thing and not contribute to the base projects. I’d love to be convinced wrong!)
Wide C2S and ActivityPods support would address most of what led to the creation of AT. Lacking that, they made AT.
The rest is revealed in the developer community. AT and AP followed similar timelines for the first year or so, then diverged.
The main thing I heard from AP devs is that it's hard even before dealing with Mastodon quirks for any meaningful connection to the AP network. AP's early developer energy looks like AT's now, except AT's has been sustained for years and is only growing.
AP hasn't even managed a second conference, and that's where all the big AT stuff started at its first one. For example: Streamplace was new and awkward to use last year. This year, it was the official streaming platform with three simultaneous streams and had integration with the official ticketing system. I can't even list all the AT platforms people used to coordinate, trade info, etc during the conference. None of them had to deal with a clunky API since it's all JSON in a standard format on your PDS through a standard interface.
This is the best question, because my gut is that "feature" that it touts over AP is much more a dangerous bug.
This is "take it with you."
What "take it with you" does in the ATProto way shores up and makes more robust the permanence of what you post. Sounds good, but also potentially harmful in terms of surveillance et al.
The ActivityPub approach is less robust and theres more room for deletion and non-reliability. Which in some ways is bad, but also helps in terms of "plausible deniability."
In other words, if you're Big Brother, you much prefer ATProto.
A system where people derive a mistaken sense of privacy seems more dangerous. AT is getting something in permissioned data that's closer to what people think they get on AP.
On one hand atproto has content-addressed storage and portable identity that AP still lacks (but could have!), on the other hand atproto is far more centralized. The data layer is decentralized but everything on top is effectively centralized. Phrases like "practical decentralization" and "credible exit" are used to describe this design.
I don’t get this post at all. Just because the Bluesky people opted to call things “open” doesn’t make it so. ATproto helps the open web as much as NFTs and DAPs did before it.
Just want to add that the AT Protocol IETF working group has been formed, and the PLC directory independent organization and board has officially been established. I’m at the closing talk for this years Atmosphere Conference as I write this and it’s really an incredible community of devs.
I'm excited to see communities of developers working to build things that are meaningful and matter to regular people, which ATProto seems to have more of than some other ecosystems in decent tech land. And where else could you attend an awesome workshop on "Hospicing Social Media?"
Since this re-surfaced from the second chance queue, this is a good place to say they just announced the first and very important steps to an independent PLC directory: https://martianbase.net/@mackuba/116314877708269740
From the alt text:
Initial board
- Bryan Newbold - Bluesky, protocol engineer
- Richard Barnes - Co-founder Let's Encrypt, Co-author MLS, ACME, HPKE, etc
- Wendy Seltzer - Internet Lawyer & open standards advocate
- Filippo Valsorda - Cryptographer, Go cryptography maintainer, transparency log aficionado
- Thyla van der Merwe - Cryptographer, security & privacy engineer at Google
This is on top of the IETF working group news: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/atp/about/
I can really get behind this positive take on ATProto and the ecosystem. I know there was early criticism, but much of that stems from the project taking a fairly long-term viewpoint early on, and then having to work their way towards fulfilling that. We're now at that point, and the model looks great.
I still don’t think the model is quite great until the bandwidth problem is solved in a way that doesn’t make it prohibitively expensive for alternative appview hosting.
It’s the one part of the whole system I think needs a lot of work.
Related: Cory Doctorow joined Bluesky using self-hosting:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/05/executive-dysfunction/
> It's not enough for the people who run a service to be good people – they also have to take steps to insulate themselves (and their successors) from the kind of drip-drip-drip rationalizations that turn a series of small ethical waivers into a cumulative avalanche of pure wickedness
I completely disagree with this guy. No amount of process or protocol can be a substitute for an actually decent organization culture; without the latter, everything falls apart no matter how good the former is.
I agree; and whatever you think that is good can possibly be used against you. This is why I think ATProto is possibly dangerous, it makes Big Brother's job easier, as opposed to how ActivityPub does it.
Twitter confirmed that Cory Doctorow was right. See also: Reddit and Freenode exodus.
What's the trade-off between this and ActivityPub?
I might be being cynical but I think I've seen this story play out before. Did Bluesky genuinely believe that AP wouldn't work for their use-case, or did they want to own the protocol?
They cover a couple reasons on their FAQ
https://atproto.com/guides/faq#why-not-use-activity-pub
A couple of pretty good reasons (except the one about lexicons IMHO), but I don’t think it’s reasonable to believe the maker of a 15th standard was “right” about not using the previous 14s. As far as I understand, all the use cases described in OP’s article can be fulfilled with ActivityPub.
I’d love to see an article showing use cases in both AtProto and ActivityPub and showing why AtProto is the superior choice.
(To me, the hype for AT protocol vs. ActivityPub feels like the hype for DevEnv vs. Nix – I’m slightly upset that the latter isn’t taking off because the former decides to do its own thing and not contribute to the base projects. I’d love to be convinced wrong!)
Wide C2S and ActivityPods support would address most of what led to the creation of AT. Lacking that, they made AT.
The rest is revealed in the developer community. AT and AP followed similar timelines for the first year or so, then diverged.
The main thing I heard from AP devs is that it's hard even before dealing with Mastodon quirks for any meaningful connection to the AP network. AP's early developer energy looks like AT's now, except AT's has been sustained for years and is only growing.
AP hasn't even managed a second conference, and that's where all the big AT stuff started at its first one. For example: Streamplace was new and awkward to use last year. This year, it was the official streaming platform with three simultaneous streams and had integration with the official ticketing system. I can't even list all the AT platforms people used to coordinate, trade info, etc during the conference. None of them had to deal with a clunky API since it's all JSON in a standard format on your PDS through a standard interface.
VODs are coming soon: https://bsky.app/profile/iame.li/post/3miahg7vlgs2w
Nix is definitely taking off though ;)
This is the best question, because my gut is that "feature" that it touts over AP is much more a dangerous bug.
This is "take it with you."
What "take it with you" does in the ATProto way shores up and makes more robust the permanence of what you post. Sounds good, but also potentially harmful in terms of surveillance et al.
The ActivityPub approach is less robust and theres more room for deletion and non-reliability. Which in some ways is bad, but also helps in terms of "plausible deniability."
In other words, if you're Big Brother, you much prefer ATProto.
A system where people derive a mistaken sense of privacy seems more dangerous. AT is getting something in permissioned data that's closer to what people think they get on AP.
On one hand atproto has content-addressed storage and portable identity that AP still lacks (but could have!), on the other hand atproto is far more centralized. The data layer is decentralized but everything on top is effectively centralized. Phrases like "practical decentralization" and "credible exit" are used to describe this design.
Whooo those are some doublespeak phrases if I've ever heard them.
Credible exit? What is that supposed to mean?
Credible exit was popularized by the co-author of ActivityPub.
https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
https://dustycloud.org/blog/re-re-bluesky-decentralization/
Some of the bits in there are out of date, but still good reads.
The best part was the Doom running over AT Protocol. Jetstream is a bit patchy, but running Doom - I would never have thought it possible
[dead]
I don’t get this post at all. Just because the Bluesky people opted to call things “open” doesn’t make it so. ATproto helps the open web as much as NFTs and DAPs did before it.