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Comment by TrevorFSmith | Hacker News Reader

If a team can't work within an existing standards body or a community (like the ActivityPub contributors) then they simply can't create an actually decentralized and open protocol/network. They can, however, create something that they can define and control for their own gain.

Rolling out this protocol on a site without a community forum or other discussion channel but simply a "give us your email address and we'll let you know when it's done" is a red flag.

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Many of the world's strongest standards – including those of the internet – were standardized from work that first proved itself outside "standards bodies", rather than emerged from them. Standards bodies are better at codifying practices proven to work than bootstrapping new approaches, and quickly become highly-political impediments to innovation as the stakes grow & entrenched interests arrive.

Also, despite the ideals & good work of early ActivityPub work, in practice its server-centricity has already sent it many evolutionary steps down towards the same semi-feudal architecture as email & HTTP, where your identity, content-policies, & even privacy are at the mercy of your "home server" (feudal lord).

Even the real option to freely choose a new liege (at some serious switching costs) doesn't promptly or fully address this weakness, and the theoretical potential for practices to be radically different faces a giant "architecture tax" from the installed base, & costs/expectations of backward-compatibility.

Users of ActivityPub have already self-selected for those who are OK with such "home server" dependencies. Why, they find them "cozy" & even have (well-reasoned!) apologetics describing ways in which this user-homeserver co-dependency is good – for their needs.

So why should people with a very different vision, informed by both the limits of the giant proprietary platforms and of ActivityPub, fight a slow uphill slog in that community, as opposed to pursing a "green field" (or you might even say "blue sky") effort with fewer constraints? Appropriate formats & conventions from prior work like ActivityPub can still be reused, whenever helpful.

Why does every new idea need to work within the constraints of ActivityPub and W3C? Their spec is fundamentally different than ActivityPub.

From what I have seen so far it is different for the sake of being different, not because they found a better way.

Two of the three pillars highlighted on the atproto.com homepage – portable accounts, and algorithmic choice – would require significant retrofitting counter to ActivityPub server customs to achieve.

(And the third, "federated social", is arguably an area that at-proto is erring by staying too close to the ActivityPub approach. We know what happens to 'federated' systems under network-economics: they trend toward semi-feudalism.)

But the fediverse doesn't use any algorithms, it just shows you what/who you subscribe to. This is the way social media should be. If I don't want to see something or someone I can just block them.

It's only gone downhill since the sites started adding algorithmic crap and filtering things out to increase 'engagement'. This made facebook totally useless for me to keep in touch with my friends.

Portable accounts are indeed important and a big thing missing from ActivityPub, I agree there.

But I'm completely over to IM now to keep in touch with friends. Social Media has invalidated its own usecase for me.

Yeah.. when I saw that and something about joining a waitlist for something that should be developed in public I noped my way out. I hope other people learn have similar BS indicators and don't fall for this stuff. There is nothing open about joining a wait-list.

It’s a waitlist for the first app, not the protocol itself.

Wouldn't it be better to simply have a notification for the newsletter to keep people informed about the community work and where and how they can contribute. The page is full of content suggesting that users are simply to wait back while this supposedly open protocol is developed with no community involvement.

The waitlist is just for the app. We've been developing the protocol in a public repo on Github for months, but most people don't have the patience to follow open source code development, so we'll notify them when we can put a usable app in their hands.

MIT licensed protocol code, public since May: https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto

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