> Social media was supposed to connect us, but most of it has turned into ads, division, and loneliness. I'm betting on ATProto as a way to fix that
I disagree with the premise here. I think the core mechanics of social media, ie instant communication between random strangers about random topics, creates toxic interactions regardless of whether it's manipulated by engagement algorithms.
Some of the most toxic conversations I've seen were on Mastodon.
If there's a healthy future for socializing on the internet, I think it will happen in small communities.
That will slow down dissemination of information, but maybe that would be a good thing.
This _isn’t_ the core mechanism of social media. When social media took off, Facebook and Instagram that really did allow you to connect with people that you knew from real life. Twitter was different, and more like microblogging, but I still see the real value of social media to be what the un-shitty versions of Facebook and Instagram were.
Twitter was amazing, not because of people microblogging about breakfast, but because it gave people/companies/orgs a way to interact directly with their audience. If you want to know what Kix cereal had to say - you could follow Kix.
I always wondered about this.... in the beginning of instagram, i would follow maybe 30, 40 people, open it 2-3 times per day, and every time there would be 3-5 new photos of random stuff taken by those people (lunch/dinner plates, views from the window, beer glass on the bar, whatever).
Years later, i would follow 200 people, and i would open instagram once per day and all i'd see were random peoples photos and videos (reels? i don't know what they're called anymore), some from international influences, some like stuff that can be found on 9gag, etc. Even if i switched to "following", there would maybe be 1 photo made by a person I actually followed.
Did the algorithm make people stop posting their personal daily stuff? Did people change?
I guess it's even worse now, but i've uninstalled it a few years ago.
I'm not convinced it is social media wholesale, rather it is about size. Platforms like microblogging are more about the person, the quips, the dunking.
If you are in any small communities using social platforms like Discord/Signal (chat rooms) or Discourse (forum), it's a very different feel. Most are genuinely positive experiences.
I suppose it depends on how one defines social media. My definitions are more flexible than they used to be.
Once someone builds a reasonable Google+ clone on ATProto or ActivityPub I'd probably switch to that. I don't think we've solved reputation when it comes to decentralized identity providers yet either.
I haven't really tried doing anything with ATProto, but I do regularly see content from some folks who are into it, and the thing I like about ATProto is how generally cheerful and friendly and happy the ATProto community is. They're out there with all of the zeal of the old blockchain devs, except without the inky black evil of that movement. Mind you, being a happy community mostly means projects that are either doomed or else ridiculous (looking at you, Doom-on-ATProto guys), but it feels like giddy old school hacks, and that makes me smile.
I'd be curious to see how ATProto stacks up against ActivityPub in the long run. I was very excited by the prospects of Mastodon, PeerTube, and a few other Fediverse apps. I even started implementing my own ActivityPub library based on their RFC before I fizzled out.
But, the Fediverse never really seemed to take off in the mainstream. Mozilla launched their own mastodon instance around 2023 and then closed it in 2024. I've never heard anything about PeerTube in casual conversation, and Mastodon is not common to hear about either.
As someone with a tech degree and a liberal arts degree, I think protocols like this are excellent examples of trying to solve social issues with technology instead of policy or other approaches. I can't tell you what those other approaches would be, but I haven't seen a lot of efficacy from the purely technological ones. Eventually, the pressure of turning a profit always seems to take over, pushing the moral mission aside. Still. I'm rooting for ATProto to speak truth to power and uproot apps like X and Instagram.
Re:fediverse - it depends on which communities you're part of. Digital rights, politics here in Canada (see e.g. https://mstdn.ca/@avilewis), politics in the EU (https://ec.social-network.europa.eu/about), basically anything that touches Linux is very much entrenched on the protocol. My local newspaper (https://thetyee.ca/) has a Mastodon share button on the page even. Unlike with Bluesky, leadership has been very consistent and so far trustworthy.
I could be wrong, but I hold the opinion that ATProto is the CDMA (3GPP2) of social media protocols, while ActivityPub is GSM (3GPP).
CDMA had better radio tech than GSM, but at the expense of openness. Qualcomm basically owned CDMA, and still does, while GSM was cross-licensed among everyone.
Likewise, ActivityPub is truly open while ATProto is "open" but you're basically a prisoner to Bluesky Social, the way CDMA put you in Qualcomm's prison.
Bluesky has the initial lead, but it's Twitter's estranged child. People used to Twitter find Bluesky an easier replacement. CDMA was also an easier upgrade from analog 1G networks than GSM was, due to re-using the back office systems and ESN identifiers.
Yes, Bluesky has a better experience. But maybe future ActivityPub releases will catch up for a large part. UMTS caught up to CDMA while being more open, and LTE became the universal 4G standard, with GSM-centric IMEI and SIM cards and such. And maybe PDS implementations will converge to ActivityPub with an ATProto fallback.
Keep in mind that I know nothing about the protocols, so I could be missing what makes ATProto a better tech, or not.
I think realistically the only people who care about this are a very niche number of hardcore users. I won't be surprised if federated networks never take off. Obviously there are good reasons for normies to care but when the solution is as disjointed as some of the federated stuff has been, it's just not an advantage. You end up with a bunch of idealists/nerds chatting about the same stuff. It's not terrible but the average person does not care. I mean arguably the average person doesn't really post on social media, either. Sometimes I wonder if future generations will consider this all hot air.
Really, they're kind of unncessary to begin with, you probably do want an off-ramp but it's better if a centralized service just has good governance and policies that can be affected by users. The current setup is still usually relatively closed entities that are federated.
Regarding the awareness of it in the mainstream, I somehow got too high at a local pot shop and ended up chatting with the cashier. He was a former gamedev and knew what quaternions were (we were both confused by them), but I felt deep shame when I mentioned IRC and he clearly had never heard of it. I don't think outside of HN and other niches, people have heard or care about these federated protocols. It's a very nerdy/self-indulgent need to worry about whether all of your Internet writings are accessible via various means.
The Fediverse did take off. Then large numbers of influential people got banned by randos and realized how much better and reliable (non-profit or not) corporate censors are.
I understand your pedantic point but let me give a realistic reply. If your account, or the account of somebody you like corresponding with, happens to be on an instance that falls into disfavour (not uncommon in my time there) then server bans come out and conversations become broken, even between parties who had no knowledge of the overarching drama. Good luck even understanding it if you aren’t a techie.
FYI the activitypub RFC won't actually help you. What you have to do is copy how Mastodon actually communicates with other copies of itself. If you base your work on the RFC, it won't actually communicate with Mastodon or with all the other software that pretends to be Mastodon.
How does ATProto solve the problems that the last 10–20 years have shown seem intrinsic to all social media once it hits a certain scale?
For example:
A simple simulation of social networks rapidly reproduced three well-documented dysfunctions: partisan echo chambers, concentrated influence among a small elite, and amplification of polarized voices - creating a "social media prism" that distorts political discourse. Notably, all attempts at conscious intervention failed to help or made things worse. [1]
Rather than fostering closer relationships, the algorithms and structures underlying social media platforms inadvertently contribute to profound psychological harm - particularly among teenagers, who are disproportionately affected by curated online personas, peer pressure to present a perfect digital image, and constant notification bombardment. [2]
And from Meta's own internal UX research, surfaced in recent harm-related court filings: researchers described Instagram as functionally a drug, users as binging to the point of reward deficit, and the platform's role as that of a pusher. [3]
I've gradually opted out of social media over the last few years. That Meta internal research was the thing that finally pushed me to delete IG, the last social app I was still using. My life has been noticeably calmer and better adjusted since - which makes me skeptical that a better protocol, rather than a fundamentally different relationship with technology and socialization, is our way out of the current mess.
I prefer the Fediverse to BlueSky, because it solves your three problems.
I choose to see every post on my (small country) instance, so if there is an echo chamber, it's an instance-shaped one. Which I like - I see the range of views prevalent in my small country. "Elite" posters depend on posting good content and are rewarded only by other people boosting their posts.
I tend to use Mastodon which makes finding a post's popularity a click away, and so emphasises posting for interest instead of outrage. This may also be an artifact of living in a small country that expects more civilised discourse from it's citizens.
Having no algorithm definitely makes the Fediverse more "boring" - I had to persevere after moving from Twitter. But I soon realised this was due to the lack of outrage, and that that was what I wanted, and what I was seeing was far more "real". Big fan now, and it's made my social media consumption a lot healthier.
> How does ATProto solve the problems that the last 10–20 years have shown seem intrinsic to all social media once it hits a certain scale?
It doesn't. There is currently no single design that eliminates all the major pathologies at once. Social media harms come from a mix of business incentives, ranking systems, scale, moderation burdens, and power concentration, so fixing one layer does not automatically fix the rest. Recent research on decentralized protocols shows that they aim to redistribute power and user agency, but they also face governance problems and risks of power re-concentrating at key decision points (see the discussion section in [1]).
The credible exit allows for real competition. In other words you can own your identity and data, apps store content in your database, and you can swap out apps that enshittify, eg. there are many alternative clients for bluesky data.
The design of feeds (algos) and labellers (moderation) is unique and one of the best parts of the protocol.
There are also interesting applications for inter-app features, a double edged sword, i.e. good for content creators but bad for something like linkedin.
Focusing on protocol and decentralisation is putting the cart before the horse. The reason why Twitter, and Reddit in particular work so well is because of sub-communities that form organically. More importantly, discovery was part of the value in using it. It's why every Mastodon community specific to one niche/subject is not very interesting, people are not one single interest, we follow someone we like for one reason, maybe it's they make cool art, then we find out they also make music too, then bam, you discover a new genre of music and the community around it. Decentralisation actively introduces friction into the most rewarding loop of the entire thing. Centralisation isn't the problem, it's just comorbid with shitty governance.
There are a lot of small, informal and fuzzy communities around specific interests in Twitter. For example, I routinely run into the same folks talking about some specific areas in PL/FP or in complex systems/resilience engineering. These sub-communities aren't clearly delineated like a subreddit, rather they arise organically through the same set of people following each other or, at least, consistently appearing in each others' feeds and conversations.
Utaite. Will find barely any anywhere else. Thankfully if you're in one of those sub-communities, you don't ever get recommended anything political or American.
Discord is my goto choice for communities now, but I fear that company is not on a great trajectory either. It's like voting, you're picking for the least evil
Isn't this just reinventing the wheel of a website, an email list and a message board?
Are the scientists referenced in this article really so averse to having a website or corresponding via email that they need a social media instance to chat with every Tom, Dick and Harry that can't put up with the friction of clicking a mailto: link? How did that go during Covid, when everyone on Twitter suddenly became an infectious disease specialist?
> So you could use another app like Blacksky and have the same exact posts, comments, and likes that you do on Bluesky. And if you ever decide that you don’t like what Bluesky is doing
[...] you can move somewhere else, keeping your followers, connections, and content.
How is that different from moving to a new web host or newsletter provider? And what happens if your Bluesky connections don't move over to the new thing? Or if Bluesky chooses to create a read-only archive of your posts and changes the UI to obscure the ATproto ID or whatever it is that certifies the content as being "yours"?
This article does a good job of explaining some nuanced differences. Tl;dr - ATProto (public data) can be viewed as a distributed event bus that anyone can plug-n-play into. It's a good design imo
For example, pre-Elon Twitter, I thought Twitter was going to around a long time and I would continue to use it for many years. I left Twitter when Elon bought it.
While I'm on various social media sites now, I can fairly easily pick up a new one as I see fit. And if my audience doesn't want to follow me there, they don't have to. And I can find different people to follow on that new one.
if you are always looking for new 'audiences' it's probably just media and not social media. I use hubs my peers and friends use. IRC, email and for the boomers - Facebook.
I think that a lot of people are going to get ATProto whether they want to or not. I don't want to believe that anyone involved with it at in a decision-making or policy-driving capacity is a big enough loser to only want better social media out of it. Decentralized web apps are a proof of concept.
fyi, Bain Capital (private equity) now has a say in where things go. Technically since April of last year, but we are now just finding out because they withheld their $100M "funding"
Not trustworthy. The providers mentioned in the article, blacksky and bluesky, presumably the most visible ones, do not allow signups with anonymous email providers even though they make you pass a human verification step.
The link in the article for Blacksky (blackskyweb.xyz) has a dark pattern that attempts to get you sign up for bluesky instead of blacksky. Odd.
The bigger issue is funding - currently appears to be VC funded (seed round 2023, Series A 2024), so they'll want a return at some point. Voilà, enshittification.
The biggest selling point - portable identity - is a mirage because the current providers do not give you the cryptographic keys to your identity. So they can simply lock you down, and your 'identity' is done.
> The biggest selling point - portable identity - is a mirage because the current providers do not give you the cryptographic keys to your identity. So they can simply lock you down, and your 'identity' is done.
Here is one of many sites that help users de-risk, backup, and migrate: https://pdsmoover.com/
I bet on ATProto the last year, I've left this year. The network has been shrinking and the Bluesky leadership has been misleading about "user" numbers and hiding that they took private equity money. The atmo fund looks like a bunch of self dealing. I no longer trust any of them.
This year, I'm betting less social media as being better and in the long-run a new protocol that learns from the mistakes.
Permissioned data is probably the most fundamental, the part I looked most deeply into myself. People want privacy over blasting everything out to the internet for anyone to scrape. The public by default forced upon users is a bad choice. The purported benefits never materialized. Many of the atmo developers have this belief they can skip the network effects, grift the data and social graph for their own use.
Here's the User Intent proposal that is super easy to implement, yet they have been sitting on it since: https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/discussions/3617
This would have been at least a middle ground to permissioned data, as would have been personal private data (bsky prefs generalized).
After that money, which I see as less of a protocol thing. A protocol or platform has to enable the people to make way more money than itself, at least 10x. (1) Bluesky should have created subscriptions for their service, they wouldn't have needed the private equity had they. (2) Bluesky did more to block others making money than enable it. Graze was in talks with them to enable the creators using their feed system to make money, until Bluesky walked away. (3) Permissioned data would unlock monetization without blockchain.
Permissioned data is being worked on, but the commentary from Bluesky is not promising. (1) Nobody in ATProto has built a permission system (that I'm aware of) (2) Bluesky are proposing a very simplistic system. This will put burden on app developers and create opposition the credible exit philosophy.
Record history / editing. The former should be at the protocol level, the later on feature that is highly desired, possible today, but they resist with fervor.
Bluesky could have put way more funding into the ecosystem, especially in hindsight with the $100M they picked up just after peak. Now they are struggling and stepping on that ecosystem, re: replacing Graze instead of supporting and integrating them with their latest "ai" stunt.
Compare this to Hytale and what they are doing. Night and day.
The Bluesky team has also made several PR mistakes, upsetting their base, they are really tone deaf. Hope the waffles are tasty!
The PLC comes up a lot, and I understand the criticism, but it is also good enough for now and on the right trajectory, though the pace could be better, hut like much of the Bluesky development it has molasses in winter vibes. Long-term, multiple identity authorities can exist. Something like Handshake would have been ideal, another great project doomed by poor leadership.
Supporting delete is a good decision in my opinion, and likely a legal requirement. I also like that ATProto stuck a balance between decentralized and user experience. Properly federated systems are unlikely to appeal to the masses, re: blockchain.
Two other well designed parts of ATProto are how the algos and moderation work. Modular, composable, and anyone can participate. This would change with a properly permissioned protocol (zanzibar + macaroons imo) and encourage smaller social instead of big social.
Dude, we have been blogging about the development of the private data spec all year and shared the proposal draft a week or two ago. Sorry we didn’t pick yours.
I am all-in on face to face relationships and no longer investing in the fiction of socializing with people through a screen (or only over the phone). And I've been here since low baud modem days and through every niche internet community and medium you can think of.
Eventually I decided to prioritize my health over everything -- job, friends, extended family, hobbies -- transient relationships with things & people just don't matter any longer. If you want community you have to cultivate it and it isn't real if it isn't deeply intertwined with most of your life.
Also, owning my own copies of things too, from books to music to video tutorials. It either goes ona shelf or in the NAS and gets indexed.
I was disappointed by the hard divergence from core aspects of Tim Berners-Lee‘s vision (and its current implementations) of a Web 3.0 but oh well. Threads got on board, and it’s not to say the missing parts can’t be bolted on later. In particular any future W3C Linked Web Storage WG protocols.[1]
X just unified the feed across languages such that all posts automatically get translated for users. These kinds of innovations are much more important than the ability to be able to switch apps.
I recently left also. I saw a noticeable uptick in both these things and it's genuinely been a horrific experience over the last few months and it feels weird to now be on it a lot less.
Did it? Just checked and my feed is still completely untranslated. I have my settings set as English. I hope they don't do the weird YouTube thing of translating things from languages you know into the language you set. Multilingual people exist
> Social media was supposed to connect us, but most of it has turned into ads, division, and loneliness. I'm betting on ATProto as a way to fix that
I disagree with the premise here. I think the core mechanics of social media, ie instant communication between random strangers about random topics, creates toxic interactions regardless of whether it's manipulated by engagement algorithms.
Some of the most toxic conversations I've seen were on Mastodon.
If there's a healthy future for socializing on the internet, I think it will happen in small communities.
That will slow down dissemination of information, but maybe that would be a good thing.
This _isn’t_ the core mechanism of social media. When social media took off, Facebook and Instagram that really did allow you to connect with people that you knew from real life. Twitter was different, and more like microblogging, but I still see the real value of social media to be what the un-shitty versions of Facebook and Instagram were.
Twitter was amazing, not because of people microblogging about breakfast, but because it gave people/companies/orgs a way to interact directly with their audience. If you want to know what Kix cereal had to say - you could follow Kix.
I always wondered about this.... in the beginning of instagram, i would follow maybe 30, 40 people, open it 2-3 times per day, and every time there would be 3-5 new photos of random stuff taken by those people (lunch/dinner plates, views from the window, beer glass on the bar, whatever).
Years later, i would follow 200 people, and i would open instagram once per day and all i'd see were random peoples photos and videos (reels? i don't know what they're called anymore), some from international influences, some like stuff that can be found on 9gag, etc. Even if i switched to "following", there would maybe be 1 photo made by a person I actually followed.
Did the algorithm make people stop posting their personal daily stuff? Did people change?
I guess it's even worse now, but i've uninstalled it a few years ago.
I'm not convinced it is social media wholesale, rather it is about size. Platforms like microblogging are more about the person, the quips, the dunking.
If you are in any small communities using social platforms like Discord/Signal (chat rooms) or Discourse (forum), it's a very different feel. Most are genuinely positive experiences.
I suppose it depends on how one defines social media. My definitions are more flexible than they used to be.
Once someone builds a reasonable Google+ clone on ATProto or ActivityPub I'd probably switch to that. I don't think we've solved reputation when it comes to decentralized identity providers yet either.
For real, trust online is an open and hard problem. It's only going to get harder with ai bots running amok.
I haven't really tried doing anything with ATProto, but I do regularly see content from some folks who are into it, and the thing I like about ATProto is how generally cheerful and friendly and happy the ATProto community is. They're out there with all of the zeal of the old blockchain devs, except without the inky black evil of that movement. Mind you, being a happy community mostly means projects that are either doomed or else ridiculous (looking at you, Doom-on-ATProto guys), but it feels like giddy old school hacks, and that makes me smile.
I'd be curious to see how ATProto stacks up against ActivityPub in the long run. I was very excited by the prospects of Mastodon, PeerTube, and a few other Fediverse apps. I even started implementing my own ActivityPub library based on their RFC before I fizzled out.
But, the Fediverse never really seemed to take off in the mainstream. Mozilla launched their own mastodon instance around 2023 and then closed it in 2024. I've never heard anything about PeerTube in casual conversation, and Mastodon is not common to hear about either.
As someone with a tech degree and a liberal arts degree, I think protocols like this are excellent examples of trying to solve social issues with technology instead of policy or other approaches. I can't tell you what those other approaches would be, but I haven't seen a lot of efficacy from the purely technological ones. Eventually, the pressure of turning a profit always seems to take over, pushing the moral mission aside. Still. I'm rooting for ATProto to speak truth to power and uproot apps like X and Instagram.
Re:fediverse - it depends on which communities you're part of. Digital rights, politics here in Canada (see e.g. https://mstdn.ca/@avilewis), politics in the EU (https://ec.social-network.europa.eu/about), basically anything that touches Linux is very much entrenched on the protocol. My local newspaper (https://thetyee.ca/) has a Mastodon share button on the page even. Unlike with Bluesky, leadership has been very consistent and so far trustworthy.
I could be wrong, but I hold the opinion that ATProto is the CDMA (3GPP2) of social media protocols, while ActivityPub is GSM (3GPP).
CDMA had better radio tech than GSM, but at the expense of openness. Qualcomm basically owned CDMA, and still does, while GSM was cross-licensed among everyone.
Likewise, ActivityPub is truly open while ATProto is "open" but you're basically a prisoner to Bluesky Social, the way CDMA put you in Qualcomm's prison.
Bluesky has the initial lead, but it's Twitter's estranged child. People used to Twitter find Bluesky an easier replacement. CDMA was also an easier upgrade from analog 1G networks than GSM was, due to re-using the back office systems and ESN identifiers.
Yes, Bluesky has a better experience. But maybe future ActivityPub releases will catch up for a large part. UMTS caught up to CDMA while being more open, and LTE became the universal 4G standard, with GSM-centric IMEI and SIM cards and such. And maybe PDS implementations will converge to ActivityPub with an ATProto fallback.
Keep in mind that I know nothing about the protocols, so I could be missing what makes ATProto a better tech, or not.
I think realistically the only people who care about this are a very niche number of hardcore users. I won't be surprised if federated networks never take off. Obviously there are good reasons for normies to care but when the solution is as disjointed as some of the federated stuff has been, it's just not an advantage. You end up with a bunch of idealists/nerds chatting about the same stuff. It's not terrible but the average person does not care. I mean arguably the average person doesn't really post on social media, either. Sometimes I wonder if future generations will consider this all hot air.
Really, they're kind of unncessary to begin with, you probably do want an off-ramp but it's better if a centralized service just has good governance and policies that can be affected by users. The current setup is still usually relatively closed entities that are federated.
Regarding the awareness of it in the mainstream, I somehow got too high at a local pot shop and ended up chatting with the cashier. He was a former gamedev and knew what quaternions were (we were both confused by them), but I felt deep shame when I mentioned IRC and he clearly had never heard of it. I don't think outside of HN and other niches, people have heard or care about these federated protocols. It's a very nerdy/self-indulgent need to worry about whether all of your Internet writings are accessible via various means.
The Fediverse did take off. Then large numbers of influential people got banned by randos and realized how much better and reliable (non-profit or not) corporate censors are.
>Then large numbers of influential people got banned by randos
Given the state of other social media. The randos were right to ban them probably.
How can you be banned from the fediverse?
I understand your pedantic point but let me give a realistic reply. If your account, or the account of somebody you like corresponding with, happens to be on an instance that falls into disfavour (not uncommon in my time there) then server bans come out and conversations become broken, even between parties who had no knowledge of the overarching drama. Good luck even understanding it if you aren’t a techie.
Banned for what?
...for them.
FYI the activitypub RFC won't actually help you. What you have to do is copy how Mastodon actually communicates with other copies of itself. If you base your work on the RFC, it won't actually communicate with Mastodon or with all the other software that pretends to be Mastodon.
How does ATProto solve the problems that the last 10–20 years have shown seem intrinsic to all social media once it hits a certain scale?
For example:
A simple simulation of social networks rapidly reproduced three well-documented dysfunctions: partisan echo chambers, concentrated influence among a small elite, and amplification of polarized voices - creating a "social media prism" that distorts political discourse. Notably, all attempts at conscious intervention failed to help or made things worse. [1]
Rather than fostering closer relationships, the algorithms and structures underlying social media platforms inadvertently contribute to profound psychological harm - particularly among teenagers, who are disproportionately affected by curated online personas, peer pressure to present a perfect digital image, and constant notification bombardment. [2]
And from Meta's own internal UX research, surfaced in recent harm-related court filings: researchers described Instagram as functionally a drug, users as binging to the point of reward deficit, and the platform's role as that of a pusher. [3]
I've gradually opted out of social media over the last few years. That Meta internal research was the thing that finally pushed me to delete IG, the last social app I was still using. My life has been noticeably calmer and better adjusted since - which makes me skeptical that a better protocol, rather than a fundamentally different relationship with technology and socialization, is our way out of the current mess.
[1] https://arxiv.org/html/2508.03385v1 [2] https://scholar.dsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1222&con... [3] https://www.lieffcabraser.com/pdf/2025-11-21-Brief-dckt-2480... (p. 33)
I prefer the Fediverse to BlueSky, because it solves your three problems.
I choose to see every post on my (small country) instance, so if there is an echo chamber, it's an instance-shaped one. Which I like - I see the range of views prevalent in my small country. "Elite" posters depend on posting good content and are rewarded only by other people boosting their posts.
I tend to use Mastodon which makes finding a post's popularity a click away, and so emphasises posting for interest instead of outrage. This may also be an artifact of living in a small country that expects more civilised discourse from it's citizens.
Having no algorithm definitely makes the Fediverse more "boring" - I had to persevere after moving from Twitter. But I soon realised this was due to the lack of outrage, and that that was what I wanted, and what I was seeing was far more "real". Big fan now, and it's made my social media consumption a lot healthier.
Username checks out for fedi user ;)
> How does ATProto solve the problems that the last 10–20 years have shown seem intrinsic to all social media once it hits a certain scale?
It doesn't. There is currently no single design that eliminates all the major pathologies at once. Social media harms come from a mix of business incentives, ranking systems, scale, moderation burdens, and power concentration, so fixing one layer does not automatically fix the rest. Recent research on decentralized protocols shows that they aim to redistribute power and user agency, but they also face governance problems and risks of power re-concentrating at key decision points (see the discussion section in [1]).
[1] https://arxiv.org/html/2505.22962v1
The credible exit allows for real competition. In other words you can own your identity and data, apps store content in your database, and you can swap out apps that enshittify, eg. there are many alternative clients for bluesky data.
The design of feeds (algos) and labellers (moderation) is unique and one of the best parts of the protocol.
There are also interesting applications for inter-app features, a double edged sword, i.e. good for content creators but bad for something like linkedin.
> The credible exit allows for real competition
This is a myth. The ATProto providers don't give you the cryptographic keys to your identity, so if they lock down your account, you can't migrate.
While it is not the default for good reason (onboarding ux), you can establish your own keys and prevent that lock down.
Here is one of many sites that help users de-risk, backup, and migrate: https://pdsmoover.com/
We are still betting on technology to fix society scale problems I see.
Focusing on protocol and decentralisation is putting the cart before the horse. The reason why Twitter, and Reddit in particular work so well is because of sub-communities that form organically. More importantly, discovery was part of the value in using it. It's why every Mastodon community specific to one niche/subject is not very interesting, people are not one single interest, we follow someone we like for one reason, maybe it's they make cool art, then we find out they also make music too, then bam, you discover a new genre of music and the community around it. Decentralisation actively introduces friction into the most rewarding loop of the entire thing. Centralisation isn't the problem, it's just comorbid with shitty governance.
> The reason why Twitter, and Reddit in particular work so well is because of sub-communities that form organically.
Which sub-communities are on Twitter right now?
There are a lot of small, informal and fuzzy communities around specific interests in Twitter. For example, I routinely run into the same folks talking about some specific areas in PL/FP or in complex systems/resilience engineering. These sub-communities aren't clearly delineated like a subreddit, rather they arise organically through the same set of people following each other or, at least, consistently appearing in each others' feeds and conversations.
Utaite. Will find barely any anywhere else. Thankfully if you're in one of those sub-communities, you don't ever get recommended anything political or American.
It seems like most of Japan.
Japanese is the second most used language on Bluesky
https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.d...
Is the same algorithmic connectivity with Japanese happening on Bluesky as it is on Twitter, or are Bluesky's algorithms just as opaque as Twitter's?
I'm not sure myself, however in atproto you can fetch all the data and do analytics, love it or hate it.
Discord is my goto choice for communities now, but I fear that company is not on a great trajectory either. It's like voting, you're picking for the least evil
Nazis, groypers, Christian Nationalists
Isn't this just reinventing the wheel of a website, an email list and a message board?
Are the scientists referenced in this article really so averse to having a website or corresponding via email that they need a social media instance to chat with every Tom, Dick and Harry that can't put up with the friction of clicking a mailto: link? How did that go during Covid, when everyone on Twitter suddenly became an infectious disease specialist?
> So you could use another app like Blacksky and have the same exact posts, comments, and likes that you do on Bluesky. And if you ever decide that you don’t like what Bluesky is doing [...] you can move somewhere else, keeping your followers, connections, and content.
How is that different from moving to a new web host or newsletter provider? And what happens if your Bluesky connections don't move over to the new thing? Or if Bluesky chooses to create a read-only archive of your posts and changes the UI to obscure the ATproto ID or whatever it is that certifies the content as being "yours"?
https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers
This article does a good job of explaining some nuanced differences. Tl;dr - ATProto (public data) can be viewed as a distributed event bus that anyone can plug-n-play into. It's a good design imo
I've realized not to bet on any social media.
For example, pre-Elon Twitter, I thought Twitter was going to around a long time and I would continue to use it for many years. I left Twitter when Elon bought it.
While I'm on various social media sites now, I can fairly easily pick up a new one as I see fit. And if my audience doesn't want to follow me there, they don't have to. And I can find different people to follow on that new one.
You never know what is going to happen.
if you are always looking for new 'audiences' it's probably just media and not social media. I use hubs my peers and friends use. IRC, email and for the boomers - Facebook.
I think that a lot of people are going to get ATProto whether they want to or not. I don't want to believe that anyone involved with it at in a decision-making or policy-driving capacity is a big enough loser to only want better social media out of it. Decentralized web apps are a proof of concept.
fyi, Bain Capital (private equity) now has a say in where things go. Technically since April of last year, but we are now just finding out because they withheld their $100M "funding"
ahem, Bain Capital "Crypto", to be exact. Among others.
https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-19-2026-series-b
Did not know that Bloomberg was into VC now.
Bain Capital subsidiaries are still Bain Capital. Crypto makes it even less appealing imo.
I think I just need to be less online, I've kind of lost hope.
Not trustworthy. The providers mentioned in the article, blacksky and bluesky, presumably the most visible ones, do not allow signups with anonymous email providers even though they make you pass a human verification step.
The link in the article for Blacksky (blackskyweb.xyz) has a dark pattern that attempts to get you sign up for bluesky instead of blacksky. Odd.
The bigger issue is funding - currently appears to be VC funded (seed round 2023, Series A 2024), so they'll want a return at some point. Voilà, enshittification.
The biggest selling point - portable identity - is a mirage because the current providers do not give you the cryptographic keys to your identity. So they can simply lock you down, and your 'identity' is done.
> The biggest selling point - portable identity - is a mirage because the current providers do not give you the cryptographic keys to your identity. So they can simply lock you down, and your 'identity' is done.
Here is one of many sites that help users de-risk, backup, and migrate: https://pdsmoover.com/
> Here is one of many sites that help users de-risk, backup, and migrate
Unfortunately, doesn't work if you're already locked out ...
I bet on ATProto the last year, I've left this year. The network has been shrinking and the Bluesky leadership has been misleading about "user" numbers and hiding that they took private equity money. The atmo fund looks like a bunch of self dealing. I no longer trust any of them.
This year, I'm betting less social media as being better and in the long-run a new protocol that learns from the mistakes.
> This year, I'm betting less social media as being better and in the long-run a new protocol that learns from the mistakes.
Can you list protocol level mistakes made by ATProto?
Permissioned data is probably the most fundamental, the part I looked most deeply into myself. People want privacy over blasting everything out to the internet for anyone to scrape. The public by default forced upon users is a bad choice. The purported benefits never materialized. Many of the atmo developers have this belief they can skip the network effects, grift the data and social graph for their own use.
Here's the User Intent proposal that is super easy to implement, yet they have been sitting on it since: https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/discussions/3617 This would have been at least a middle ground to permissioned data, as would have been personal private data (bsky prefs generalized).
After that money, which I see as less of a protocol thing. A protocol or platform has to enable the people to make way more money than itself, at least 10x. (1) Bluesky should have created subscriptions for their service, they wouldn't have needed the private equity had they. (2) Bluesky did more to block others making money than enable it. Graze was in talks with them to enable the creators using their feed system to make money, until Bluesky walked away. (3) Permissioned data would unlock monetization without blockchain.
Permissioned data is being worked on, but the commentary from Bluesky is not promising. (1) Nobody in ATProto has built a permission system (that I'm aware of) (2) Bluesky are proposing a very simplistic system. This will put burden on app developers and create opposition the credible exit philosophy.
Record history / editing. The former should be at the protocol level, the later on feature that is highly desired, possible today, but they resist with fervor.
Bluesky could have put way more funding into the ecosystem, especially in hindsight with the $100M they picked up just after peak. Now they are struggling and stepping on that ecosystem, re: replacing Graze instead of supporting and integrating them with their latest "ai" stunt.
Compare this to Hytale and what they are doing. Night and day.
The Bluesky team has also made several PR mistakes, upsetting their base, they are really tone deaf. Hope the waffles are tasty!
The PLC comes up a lot, and I understand the criticism, but it is also good enough for now and on the right trajectory, though the pace could be better, hut like much of the Bluesky development it has molasses in winter vibes. Long-term, multiple identity authorities can exist. Something like Handshake would have been ideal, another great project doomed by poor leadership.
Supporting delete is a good decision in my opinion, and likely a legal requirement. I also like that ATProto stuck a balance between decentralized and user experience. Properly federated systems are unlikely to appeal to the masses, re: blockchain.
Two other well designed parts of ATProto are how the algos and moderation work. Modular, composable, and anyone can participate. This would change with a properly permissioned protocol (zanzibar + macaroons imo) and encourage smaller social instead of big social.
Dude, we have been blogging about the development of the private data spec all year and shared the proposal draft a week or two ago. Sorry we didn’t pick yours.
I am all-in on face to face relationships and no longer investing in the fiction of socializing with people through a screen (or only over the phone). And I've been here since low baud modem days and through every niche internet community and medium you can think of.
Eventually I decided to prioritize my health over everything -- job, friends, extended family, hobbies -- transient relationships with things & people just don't matter any longer. If you want community you have to cultivate it and it isn't real if it isn't deeply intertwined with most of your life.
Also, owning my own copies of things too, from books to music to video tutorials. It either goes ona shelf or in the NAS and gets indexed.
I was disappointed by the hard divergence from core aspects of Tim Berners-Lee‘s vision (and its current implementations) of a Web 3.0 but oh well. Threads got on board, and it’s not to say the missing parts can’t be bolted on later. In particular any future W3C Linked Web Storage WG protocols.[1]
[1] https://www.w3.org/groups/wg/lws/
X just unified the feed across languages such that all posts automatically get translated for users. These kinds of innovations are much more important than the ability to be able to switch apps.
It's a nazi website. Before I left they started allowing people to call me the n-word
I recently left also. I saw a noticeable uptick in both these things and it's genuinely been a horrific experience over the last few months and it feels weird to now be on it a lot less.
Wasn't it always allowed? It's very common on https://www.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/
Come on man.
Did it? Just checked and my feed is still completely untranslated. I have my settings set as English. I hope they don't do the weird YouTube thing of translating things from languages you know into the language you set. Multilingual people exist
The feature only rolled out to me today and I think it started rolling out to people only a couple days ago.
Absolutely agree, but as technologists our instict is to solve problem as technical, not as social.