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Been playing around with Bluesky a bit & it’s pretty interesting. They have an easier consumer experience (signup/discovery/UI works like Twitter) and it all feels very snappy. I like how they use domain names (or subdomains) instead of what look like funky email addresses. By far the biggest problem Jay & co face is that Jack Dorsey has effectively poisoned the well on everything from people assuming it’s a crypto platform (it’s not) to assuming (understandably) that be bad at trust & safety.
I don’t think we need another protocol or whatever really, but I do think there should be an open-web platform that prioritizes building a consumer-grade experience that is suitable for orgs & institutions. I think a lot of cultural barriers make that harder to do in the fediverse (especially in the mastodon sphere), but I’m agnostic as to whether it happens on ActivityPub or the (as-yet-unproven) AT Protocol. Glad to see cool, open stuff being made.
To be clear, I love the fediverse and Mastodon, and that’s why I’ve been here from the start. I think it’s been a great evolution from the RSS era to Atom to ActivityPub to Mastodon API (which is a defacto standard on top of all of that) but I also appreciate learning from other systems & seeing what’s good about them. I’m not going anywhere, but I am pushing for this entire ecosystem to interoperate and grow to accommodate as many different use cases as possible.
@anildash could part of the answer be sites like https://phanpy.social ?
I discovered it yesterday and having only used the default interface on my instance since I signed up it has changed everything for me, both reading and posting.
Quotetoots in development by @cheeaun too 
@anildash
You don't think the (allegedly) better "nomadic" identity (or account mobility) built into AT Protocol is worth making a new protocol over?
Do you think the same functionality could be added to ActivityPub despite the ATProtocol claims?
@maegul Domains are a wonderful thing.
@maegul @anildash my understanding is that it can at least be made in ActivityPub-compatible ways, as it is done by Streams
https://codeberg.org/streams/streams
I think Hubzilla also does it?
@oblomov @anildash I don’t know, but my understanding is that hubzilla and streams (and the zot protocol) provide nomadic identity within their own platforms/protocol. With their own zot protocol, I think they’re much more akin to AT Protocol and BlueSky, and, I’m guessing, don’t add anything to ActicityPub that can be picked up by other ActivityPub platforms.
@mjgardner I mean, it’s as open as ActivityPub and mastodon are, just with different shortcomings.
@anildash @mjgardner C'mon! That's simply not true.
There is a clear difference between captive house specifications and collaborative open standards.
Governance matters.
@evan @mjgardner Maybe? I *want* it to matter, but I have plenty of counterexamples in the real world.
@anildash @mjgardner absolutely. Scale always wins, and big players get to dictate terms.
The promise of Blue Sky when it was started was that Twitter was going to be part of the network. That would have been a real game-changer.
Without that leverage, I don't know if they have a lot to bring to the table.
@evan @anildash @mjgardner Evan, your takes here are a breath of fresh air, thank you... it seemed like everyone was being taken in without any critical thinking :/
@evan
I haven't followed Blue Sky. I thought it was Twitter's play (and ploy). Did they give up?
And does that change the equation re the Fediverse?
@evan
> Scale always wins, and big players get to dictate terms.
While that is generally true, if you are looking for a friendly social environment for smaller or more culturally or economically different groups, Fedi might be better.
@bhaugen oh, yeah. I meant, if there's an open protocol with 1000 users, and a corporate one with 100,000,000 users, the corporate one is going to dominate.
@evan ...but for example if I want to organize a non-capitalist local or regional economic system (and I do) the dominance of a big player does not matter and may get in the way...
@bhaugen sure. I'm just talking about the Big Tech Horse Race.
To fill in blanks. Bluesky is an incorporated nonprofit - Said to be funded by Twitter with enough to run at its current scale for a while. Don’t think T has any ownership. Dorsey is on the board. I was in the early Bs conversations and nobody from Twitter participated.
Bs was interesting because maybe Twitter was going to open up for federation. Now it’s only interesting if their (so far unimplemented) fed protocol is somehow better than AP.
@timbray @evan @anildash @mjgardner It’s a “Public Benefit LLC”: https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/2-7-2022-overview
I’m not a lawyer but that’s a far, far cry from a “nonprofit”: https://delcode.delaware.gov/title6/c018/sc12/index.html
@anildash Why do you think that Anil? The distributed infrastructure of the Internet runs on protocols and one might even say it’s successful because of them.
Protocol is the long term solution, no?
@anildash I haven’t read the T&C’s of BlueSky yet, but if AT is truly open, then does that mean that nothing prevents new apps from supporting both in a unified timeline? I.e. you add a Mastodon account and a BlueSky one and see a chronological timeline of both in one unified feed. When you reply to a BlueSky post, the app sends it out via AT and similarly for Mastodon replies. When you make a new post yourself, it either asks you which account to use, or defaults to one, or defaults to both.
@leoncowle Absolutely possible, and if AT/BS gets any traction at all, I hope it happens.
I think I could believe Dorsey is _not_ going to speedrun Twitter (attract, grow through rageclick algorithms, cash out and hand off) if it went ad-free.
Anything less than that and financially he'd be an idiot not too with a proven business model that grants him cash and influence.
As is, it looks like a vanity trap for 'slebs and plebs. Faux exclusivity and flashy UI included.
@Homebrewandhacking There’s a condescension here to “slebs and plebs” that is one of the most unappealing things about the fediverse.
I could definitely be nicer in how I phrase that. That's fair.
With the exception of yourself:
I haven't seen people famous for good deeds or important work talking about moving. I've seen people who achieved notoriety and a following doing so. They are not celebrated by me.
The sort of person who will blindly follow rather than critically challenge and unfollow people who express hateful or foolish thoughts exist. The first section cannot exist without this second.
@anildash It would sadden me if #Mastodon resists obvious improvements because many here actually want it to stay small and exclusive. If Masto can come up quickly with some of the changes many from Twitter want to have (like QT) it may grow quite a bit more. Otherwise it gives time to competing platforms to catch up and surpass it.
@anildash Would it be possible to make something that is compatible with both protocols, as they currently exist?
@misc Yep! I expect that’ll happen.
@anildash I call this: “yes and”: I have the tech, attention and time to curate, connect and consume across multiple platforms and cultures.
What a GREAT time to be alive!
@anildash I like both BlueSky and Nostr but the Fediverse still has the better community. I'll stick around where ever has the best content I am interested in and interacts in the best way.
@anildash I didn't know there was such a direct lineage here, or really that Mastodon is a (general?) protocol, rather than being "just" the Mastodon application's protocol. This all sounds very interesting though; if you know a good summary / write up, would you please share it?
@anildash I'd love to get Blue Sky on board with ActivityPub. Please pass along my offer to help them implement the protocol and join the network.
@anildash Do you think in the long run Bluesky and Mastodon will be interconnected using ActivityPub?
@anildash How do you feel about bsky as a going concern now that you’ve been received there by a slavering religious mob trying to burn you at the stake for heresy?
@ablaze I mean, folks have had that experience on the fediverse too. I’m not a typical enough user in any regard to shape my opinion of the platform based on my reception.
@anildash That’s fair. It just seems to me the differences between these protocols has instantiated a kinda clean split on what are actually ideological lines, having to do with moderation philosophies, fReEdOM oF SpeeCh etc. I wondered if you had the same “not for me!!” reaction I had over there.
It took me until the Doge Wave to start using this, so I’m not super versed in the ways of the Fedi hard core, but I get along with human-moderation people way better than AI-moderation people.
it does not have to be "or", either or both protocols can be be flexible enough to support federation with the other (like e.g. TCP/IP), users don't care about protocols
@anildash I keep coming back to this. No organization would accept a proprietary protocol for email or for telephone.
I would love to see it for public discourse (and don't get me started on video conferencing).