I don’t quite understand a lot of the details on how the implementations work.
In what ways is AT better or worse than ActivityPub? Are there different versions of ActivityPub? Are there improvements coming to either to make them better (or compatible)?
My current understanding is
- AT makes it easier to move accounts (according to them), but AT is controlled and maintained by BlueSky, and they are a for-profit company that can mess with the protocol in the future, which goes against the central idea of decentralized social media
What other cool technical details are there?
I’ll try to explain to the best of my ability, from having used both and figuring things out.
On Atproto, the federation is very much more on the backend, where the Personal Data Servers are interlinked and people access the protocol through bsky.app or some other app they wish to use. They have started rolling out the infrastructure to allow federation between different PDSs and have started moving user data to them. They’ve made for a more predictable, consistent federated experience (which has been a criticism of the ActivityPub’s fediverse), and allowed for a more resilient infrastructure, but unfortunately it’s limited to what Bluesky wants which is just microblogging while ActivityPub is more flexible (see: Mastodon, Lemmy, Funkwhale, PeerTube, Wordpress, etc.) but has the cultural issue of people treating their instance like their own personal forum and not a critical part of the fediverse’s infrastructure.
What makes AT protocol “more predictable, consistent”? I cannot find a detailed article about the protocol except empty hype articles.
Well for one, if a feature is implemented in Atproto, it’ll be implemented for the entire federated network. With ActivityPub, there’s inconsistency with the features (You still need Glitch-soc if you want Mastodon with text formatting, for instance) and, while yes it’s cool that I can talk to Lemmy from my Mastodon account, it’s quite a clunky experience IMO and shouldn’t be a selling point to the regular user who just wants to post about what they’re doing.
A technical overview of Atproto can be retrieved here.
I do wish they were slightly more interoperable. It’s currently very hard if not impossible to discuss Mastodon posts directly within Lemmy, and likewise you can’t make a Mastodon-style post to your personal Lemmy profile. These may seem like unimportant changes, but I think much of that stems from still viewing these services from the frame of the limitations of what they are based on. They could be so much more!
Lemmy itself has big problems with the interoperability of servers. There are two major issues I see with the way communities are structured. The first is that listed subscriber numbers are for your server only, which makes the entire ecosystem seem way less lively than it actually is, which has the effect of making it even less so. Subscriber numbers should be fed in from a community’s home server.
The second is that there are many redundant communities, which makes it difficult for onboarding new users. There should be some way to group like-communities into super-groups based on topics. That way community leaders have the ability to easily aggregate similar content, rather than leaving it to the user to figure out, and you could opt-out as a user by simply not subscribing to the super-group community.
Mastodon has promised to add groups soonish, so that will likely improve interoperability with Lemmy a lot.
For your first issue, subscriber counts will be fixed in Lemmy v0.19.0
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1440
Preview here: https://voyager.lemmy.ml/communities?listingType=All&sort=TopMonth&page=1
Yeah this one has an issue open, you could join the discussion if you have any ideas, this is a big one
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818
FWIW, Kbin does have some microblogging capabilities - used it a little before joining this instance. I know magazines can have a dedicated microblogging community. I feel like it’s a decent equivalent to Reddit live chats.
My current understanding from reading some 3rd party articles is that AT employs a DAG to synchronize messages more consistently.
AP has a different model that has some downsides in regards to consistency, but it should be significantly more resource efficient and have better recovery from failure modes.
So in AT, unlike in AP, activity takes place between multiple servers and not only two servers 🤔
One of the bsky devs has clarified that they do want peertube/wordpress/lemmy type sites to exist on the protocol as well
Guess I fell for what the fediverse said about that, lol whoops. But thanks!