ATProto Isn't What You Think

This is the clear and present problem in my eyes. I disagree with your first premise. I feel like it's unfair to call it over and unsuccessful. Many people are investing directly in the problem we're discussing. It's my hope this is the core focus of everyone working on AT at the moment: incentivizing some kind of competition in the ecosystem and creating and actively demonstrating that value add. Many want Bluesky to be viable because the alternative publishing platform is a dumpster fire. However, it's only fair to admit this doesn't magically make it so. I'd really like to see some more concrete details on how they plan to generate revenue.

Sometimes you don't have to excel at everything, just be better than your competitors.

The thing that steams my rice personally is that I am friends and acquaintances with a variety of different folks who use social media. I don't think Bluesky would have seen nearly as much adoption if it didn't position itself as having solutions to the inherent problems of centralized social media: the same promises are what propelled growth on Mastodon, too. But see, even though Mastodon is flawed in many ways, it really does solve some of the problems of centralized social media. It lacks some of the theoretical capabilities that Bluesky and AT proto offer, and I absolutely think what Bluesky and AT proto offer on paper is amazing. Censorship resistance! Host your own PDS! Relays keep working when PDSes go down! Sounds good, whereas on Mastodon your identity is tied to where your data is hosted and there's nothing good to do when an instance goes down. However... In practice, none of it matters because indeed, AT proto adoption seems rather unimpressive. The Bluesky app view offering a single URL regardless of where the data is hosted is great, but... In practice, it centralizes all of the moderation for all users. The way Bluesky operates today makes it more like Twitter with extra steps. And knowing some of the moderation woes, I'm not sure I'd categorize Bluesky as unilaterally better than Mastodon; in my opinion, the main advantage of Bluesky over Mastodon here is the lack of instance-level blocks, which I think are grossly overused in the fediverse. OTOH, though, the ability to choose an instance means you do have a choice, however inconvenient it is. Bluesky having one appview, there is one choice. You get to see what they let you.

They built something impressive, and sure, it has its fans, but I worry it attracted people under somewhat dubious pretenses. It wasn't really decentralized in any meaningful way when users originally flooded in, and to this day the actual degree to which it is decentralized is quite questionable. I understand they have valid reason to fear giving up control in any truly meaningful way, but if they can't actually do that, then is there really a point to this? In practice, if Bluesky was completely centralized, it would basically make no difference. It wouldn't change much about moderation or how censorship-resistant Bluesky is, or any of that. It'd probably just make the damn thing a lot less operationally complex, and it would effectively be Twitter but for people who are left-leaning.

Thankfully for me, I don't really want any particular Twitter-like, but it's still hard to deny the importance of Twitter. A lot of the internet's personalities and creative talents are hanging out on these crappy social media platforms. I have my misgivings with the Fediverse, I've written at length about it in the past... But if I had to pick one, right now I'd pick the Fediverse over AT proto, scale be damned, subreddit moderator problems be damned, because it offers practically useful decentralization today and not "maybe some day."

This protocol and all the clients and relays went the full decentralized route. This had up and downsides. Not all clients support all features. Not all relays support all features, and the quality between these apps is greatly differing.

But the upside is: the development is truly decentralized. Nobody is in control and every developer chooses which of the many NIP (Nostr improvement proposals) they want to incorporate or ignore.

Off course, most users will just use the most popular clients (like https://primal.net/home and https://damus.io) but simply thaking your crypographic keys and moving clients, or using a whole bunch of clients next to each other, is just such a vastly better experience then logging on to one platform, either BlueSky or X.

A couple days ago one of the most prominent alt-networks in the ATmosphere, Blacksky, received a $30k dev grant: https://bsky.app/profile/rudyfraser.com/post/3lk6gfblhdk2b

In a week from now the first ever atproto-specific conference of its scale will be taking place: https://atprotocol.dev/atmosphereconf/

the value is that you’d start with an already existing full network of users

1. Is the anything goes Happy Hour of Bluesky over?

2. Is the remnant of happy hour useful?

And, IMO, the answer to both are yes. I bet it'll coast for a decade or two and I bet it'll do tolerably; the social media wing of The Internet was given an gratuitous 1UP.

https://docs.bsky.app/docs/starter-templates/custom-feeds

and with an open API, I think 3rd part apps can do their own customization?

Because I think what we need is discovery and persistence of many self-verifying records that are independent from eachother.

In other words, each user's own identity record log is it's _own_ "blockchain" already, and we have no need for large, expensive, coordinated consensus, because each user only needs a single signature from one of their authorized keys to make changes.

So if we can just reliably distribute your identity records, then I think we've mostly solved the problem. Having the plc.directory as a standard, primary way to get those records doesn't seem like a bad idea, but having an official fallback to something like the Mainline DHT might be able to make it 100% decentralized in the event of a compromised plc.direcotry.

It's still a fuzzy idea in my head but eventually I'll do some serious thinking about this and try to get some actual proposal or community feedback if it seems like there's promise.