alt Hacker NewsI'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.
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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.
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.
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.