I'm betting on ATProto
brittanyellich.com
brittanyellich.com
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.
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.
https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-12-2024-stackable-moderati...
https://roost.tools is another group you may look into. They are broader in scope for Trust & Safety across the internet at large. Their current focus is a couple of OSS tools for builders, but the ambition is big and something to appreciate.
Please! No more!
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 do also think the novelty of posting about your life has worn off.
Not totally[0] but you'd almost never know it because of all the ads and other junk that Instagram insists you see before the stuff you actually want to see.
(see also YouTube, Facebook, etc.)
[0] although I know a few people who have either limited or stopped posting because they feel there's no point if people don't get to see it. Me, I post for myself (and future historians) and if other people see it, grand.
MSN Messenger came later, it was invite only (sorta) but we still found ways to use it to talk to strangers. MySpace was optimized to follow your friends, but almost everybody that used it used it to expand their social network outside of people we knew in the real world (MySpace was amazing btw.) Then came facebook. It went even harder then MySpace in connecting you with your friends, but still almost everybody used it outside their real world friends. Twitter sort of took social media back to the beginning before Messenger and to the IRC in strangers being your primary audience.
Larry Wall said, way back in the 1990ies,
"The social dynamics of the net are a direct consequence of the fact that nobody has yet developed a Remote Strangulation Protocol."
Which is kind of correlated to the fact that being behind a keyboard feels different to people than being face to face.
We can either use our real names (bad plan IMHO) or deal with the fact that without the consequences of our actions, there are a lot of arseholes around.
Moderation is the answer, I think there's no way around that. HN show's that it can be done well, reddit show's that it can be done badly. Twitter show's what happens when it's not done (yes I'm being a little extreme there).
Every single day of my life in the past 25 years, whenever I interact with any people online, I have been thinking of this quote:
https://bash-org-archive.com/?4281
This is the ultimate, unsolvable problem of the Internet. In the real world, being an asshat very quickly leads to being punched in the face.
All the public internet has brought is homogeneization rather than specialization.
IMO there's huge value, these are amazing connective spaces. The sheer rank pitiful nihilism of these grievance-only walk-away shut-down views is totally unacceptable, is unhelpful in extreme, is not going to move things along in any useful way, and we need to figure out how to actually improve broadly, socially.
I can't stand that such energy drain vampire viewpoints get upvoted so consistently. Stop sucking all the energy from the room, stop draining those who want to try, especially as you use the medium you are also decrying as garbage, and log off and don't post at all. We don't deserve to be continually undermined by sucking empty try-nothing dont-care nihilism.
20,000,000 accounts out of 60,000,000 [0] have already fled Bluesky in despair and will never return to it. Including some of its own creators, like jack Dorsey.
Their technology stack is completely irrelevant because it is botted to death, its user base are aggressive, angry lunatics who drag every single new account through purity tests and struggle sessions. Okay it’s a cool stack, but I wouldn’t go there or read that shit for a million dollars.
When 30% of your accounts delete themselves and never look back, it’s not even a fringe opinion that your sites toxic and not worth engaging with. And no. I’m not going to stop reading HN or participating in a dead IRC chatroom with 10 people in it just because “social media” sites are all , in the balance, equally worthless.
The stuff that gets normalized on Twitter and the stuff that gets normalized on Bluesky both disgust me. The internet is a big place and I have other options. HN is one of the few places left where quite a lot of that is not socially acceptable.
I think social media lacks these abilities to generate meaningful signal and review, and I think atproto begins to open a door to trying new things, to endless human exploration of how we do do the noosphere, how we interlink, after decades of it all being tightly controlled by big companies.
I'm way less interested in bans. I'm very interested in new ways to help us appraise and consider who we are engaging with. The labellers on Bluesky are just a start, are some initial heads-up visibility not to block but to give heads-up visibility into what content we are consuming, giving us great indicators like stechlab-labels offers. We have had so few improvements of visibility across the social sphere and atproto opens the door to networking any manner of content, of which moderation/appraisal is but a part. https://bsky.app/profile/stechlab-labels.bsky.social
There probably are ways to have as bad a time as you are saying on Bluesky. But I don't see that, don't know what you are talking about, and don't see the tensions like that. Yeah, it's social media and yeah people will have all manners of demands and insistences, but in my experience that doesn't have the vitality, isn't popular, and everyone's much more interested in having adult nuanced conversations, in finding multiple perspectives.
And I think largely I'm only semi interested in what Bluesky / atproto is today. I deeply enjoy connecting with amazing people, building incredible open data connected experiences. But I'm so keenly interested in anything that opens the door to enabling grass roots bottom up new social networking systems to spawn and grow and expand. I think most atproto fans would say similar, and I've heard the Bluesky devs themselves say, this protocol is just one go at trying to open the door to giving humanity its own chance outside big tech at building connected social systems.
For now, Atmospheric Computing is by far the best chance humanity has to improve and iterate, as I see it. https://www.pfrazee.com/blog/atmospheric-computing
(Are you sure you're not looking at number of bots kicked out in those numbers?)
3M have been taken down or deleted
MAU/WAU/DAU ~ 5M/3M/1.5M
It would be closer to say 38M+ accounts have churned for been removed, nearly 90%
I second this. Even moderation of mastodon.social and related OSS projects is toxic. It was the biggest disappointment of the last couple of years to me, even worse than Twitter ever had been.
Mastodon/ActivityPub has a lot more to offer than mastodon.social but getting to that also means leaving the Twitter look and feel and folks realising they don’t have to follow trends set for them by influencers and big VC funded operations. If it’s really a social experience, it should have a people-first focus.
And it really is not about protocols - at the end of the day, email and RSS can also form a social network.
Bingo. Not a big (or even a small) user of social media. But small, focused communities are where I see it bring the most value for the user.
They are also where I've seen the most interesting initiatives since the 90s. The rest is just influential "people" broadcasting their content.
> If there's a healthy future for socializing on the internet, I think it will happen in small communities.
I think that is why I still trust Mastodon/ActivityPub a lot more than Bluesky/ATProto. Mastodon at least provides the tools for small communities. Big instances still exist. Pile ons and drive-bys are still possible. But also Mastodon has plenty of small instances including many one-person instances. Even out of the box small instances are smaller overall traffic among the great river of ActivityPub. But also forks like Hometown exist for adding extra, simple "picket fences" around small communities. A "complete" view of ActivityPub is intentionally hard to get. By comparison, ATProto seems to me overfocused on the Relay system as a grand centralizing data bus and missing pieces of a conversation seen as much more of a bug rather than a feature (of ActivityPub).
I also think the future is healthier in the hands of smaller communities. I can teach someone how to effectively use Mastodon for small communities across an almost nice spectrum of "insular" with useful options on both sides from strangers tolerated to strangers mostly unwelcome (though that starts to lead away from Mastodon and back towards classic forum software). I don't see how to do anything like that with Bluesky and a lot of the design decisions of ATProto seem intentionally to try to avoid small communities.
Yes, but it requires both parts. HN works fine between random strangers, and random topics work fine with people you know. Its the combination that is toxic.
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)
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.
This is a mirage. The ATProto providers don't give you the cryptographic keys to your identity, so if they lock down your account, you can't migrate.
Here is one of many sites that help users de-risk, backup, and migrate: https://pdsmoover.com/
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]).
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.
They also are still generally bound to an instance's own horizon: there's no global "trending feed" (and it would be really hard to create one), these optional "algorithmic" tools still differ from instance to instance based on what that instance follows and its trading relationship to its neighbors.
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.
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.
Given the state of other social media. The randos were right to ban them probably.
That said, if you insisted that some "Germany's Independence Day" existed, then it's perhaps that what got you banned. Germany was never really a colony. Not of UK, not of Spain or Portugal, or not in newer times of Russia. Many countries that were a colony of them, or just annexxed, have an independence day. Germany doesn't --- the last time it was partially colonized, in roman times, there was no Germany.
Perhaps you mean the reunification day :-)
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.
To be fair, given Mozilla's recent record, I'd take that as a positive sign of the Fediverse's potential.
(Nope, not forgiven them for fucking up and closing Pocket. Never will.)
Which sub-communities are on Twitter right now?
https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.d...
And as usual there are some political Japanese. In fact given how small Japanese Bluesky is the amount of politics is quite shocking given that Japanese tend not to be as vocal about politics on microblogging sites. (2ch on the other hand...)
Our points are not mutually exclusive. Thanks for adding more insight. Is your bsky ratio based on actual users or the data at the link? (which is posts by language) Are there similar content stats for the site formerly known as Twitter?
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?
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!
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.
https://kevinak.se/blog/who-actually-owns-your-atproto-ident...
It's not all pleasant. For me, I have a 3rd time's the charm rule I typically follow. Others may have more or less tolerance for this sort of thing.
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
In the beginning Twitter was very free and open with API access. There were plenty of alternative apps. Of course, that changed when they got serious about monetizing.
Would it really be any harder for Bluesky to switch from ATProto to a proprietary API than it was for Twitter to close their API? How many users are realistically going to download their archives and upload them to some other provider? If most people are using the website or official app, that's where the stickiness is. There would be a blog post with a title like "Supporting the Bluesky Community for the Next Century" and how it's better to have a centralized site that can feed its employees than an idealistic decentralized one that disappears. Things would seem OK at first. But enough years of chasing quarterly KPIs would put them in the same spot as Twitter and Facebook.
So not very many. But the possibility of doing so is invaluable.
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.
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.
And that means making closed port 53 illegal on your home fiber... good luck!
Also need to open port 25 outgoing on that same fiber.
And we all need routers that run dd-wrt, the problem is all routers that support dd-wrt are sold out because support always comes late in the production cycle.
It's hard work to self host, but it's the only work worth doing.
https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-19-2026-series-b
Did not know that Bloomberg was into VC now.
I feel that's been kind of absent for a while. Sure, tech is huge and there are niches, but the general zeitgeist.
Like... the tech world went from this kind of niche thing, to "hey, hackers, you could set yourself up by creating a company and then get to do what you want", which then shifted more and more towards companies, and is right now lurching towards a world where you must pay a mega AI corporation if you want your output to be competitive.
And a little bit better but still not quite there doesn't do it for me.
Global social networks are cancer no matter the protocol, that's my opinion after many years trying to carve out a use for them in my life. No matter how hard I try to curate my feeds, inevitably they make me more angry, sad, and combative in my online life.
> The only social stuff I interact with anymore is a private forum that's paid
Im curious when you say private, do you mean you can only post if you’re a member, or is all post content viewable only by members too? And if the latter, how did you discover the forum, and how did you decide to join?
I found it because someone I followed in my Twitter days hated how nasty conversations inevitably got there, and wanted a place to have in depth, non-ephemeral conversation with like minded people.
These days you'd probably discover it via X where they still post, or their Substack.
Based on how it was depicted, it's a site-to-site (thus P2P) based system that allows encryption, hop-via-proxy and multi-stream transport (embedding files in video call).
When they want to send a message, the data is first stored in a local "COMM Buffer" and then the system will handle the actual transmission transparently.
The data transceiving can be done in real-time if the participants are near. If not, then it will work similar to how email is exchanged (except the data stream is multimedia, not just text).
How is this relates to AT Protocol (and maybe ActivePub)? Well, AT Protocol is designed to be used in "social network" settings, but "social network" was largely evolved from people forwarding emails etc. I think if you could build a really good COMM protocol that allows people exchange information quickly and efficiently, then it should be fairly easy to add social elements on top of it.
I think the idea of building a "social network protocol" itself is wrong. People get on social media to do things, maybe it's gather info, maybe it's to learn, maybe it's to make contact etc. Maybe smart people should focus on building a protocol to enable all that, rather than just trying to build something that poorly mimics what the big platform has already perfected.
Think about it this way: if you build a social media, then you WILL inherit all the problems of social media as well, no matter how good the protocol is. So maybe just build something else instead then.
People younger than me may want to read up on UUCP/NNTP/Fidonet systems, which did this. Ideal if you don't have FTL communications, or are just limited to a really slow phone line.
> People get on social media to do things, maybe it's gather info, maybe it's to learn, maybe it's to make contact etc.
Yes, exactly. There's this odd cognitive dissonance because people who make social networks are really into the process of "making a social network", but for everyone else it's a means to an end, and usually as part of a "community", however that ends up being defined.
> Think about it this way: if you build a social media, then you WILL inherit all the problems of social media as well
Yes - and those are not new. A certain segment of people are optimistic/privileged enough to not believe the problems are real until it's too late.
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.
Here is one of many sites that help users de-risk, backup, and migrate: https://pdsmoover.com/
Unfortunately, doesn't work if you're already locked out ...
And, you have to give this 3rd party site your username and password. Ouch.
I'm not sure if OAuth gives access to the account management APIs. Certainly much could be improved. Nudging users would be a good notification within the Bluesky app, like one of those on boarding task lists that doesn't have to be completed to get started, but remains visible until you complete or discard them.
goat has since moved to a dedicated repository: https://github.com/bluesky-social/goat
There is also an adversarial path (when the PDS will not play nice), but it requires setting up a rotation key and having a repo backup ahead of time.
https://www.da.vidbuchanan.co.uk/blog/adversarial-pds-migrat...
The happy developer relations is to encourage people to develop on top of this "open" platform, but it's hard to imagine that's not just growth hacking.
Why not build on top of protocols that are actually open and will still have decentralized usage in a decade?
They were, quite literally, designed to do this. They needed to monetize the user base to pay for the server costs. Zuck wanted a business.
I don’t need it so much to seek an alternative.
You have a protocol that makes it easy to concentrate the self-same toxicity it is trying to prevent.
I'd like to become social online.
I don't think we've had many times where we actually give people a chance. Sure Twitter didn't used to cost $40k a year for API access, but it still had gobs of restrictions on what you could look at and do. It still was Twitter's moderation & feeds.
The whole experience here is up for remake, perpetually. It is the anti-stagnant, the anti-rot that besets all these controlled systems.
Didn't the original facebook only show you posts of friends? Made by them or intentionally reshared by them.
Stop at that and you get rid of the influencer spam. The danger of placing yourself in a bubble is still there, but at least it's a bubble of your friends, that you could have got yourself into even in real life.
Of course, there's the question of how you finance this.
The feed was added a few years later. Originally, if you wanted to see someone's posts, you had to go to their page and look on their wall (a term I haven't heard in some time).
But, more to the point, this stuff is just Usenet where the users are the newsgroups. But that's not the basis for a community unless the user's famous. What you want is something like forums (Reddit) where people with common interests come together. Anything else is like, hyperindividualistic and isolating.
It occurred to me that "Twitter is Usenet where individual users are the topics" is peak Millennial. Dunno what I'm gonna do with that one.