alt Hacker News"There are 4 standards that try to solve this problem, its too many, we need one that finally unifies it all and solves the problem once and for all" "There are 5 standards that..."
Jokes aside, I think we need stronger arguments as to why something like activity pub is not good enough to solve the problem instead of trying to come up a new way of solving the "decentralized comms" problem.
Replies
knowtheory • yesterday at 2:27 PM
I dunno man. Why was Tangled able to ship on top of ATProto even prior to getting funded, and ForgeFed has been hanging out for years?
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nerdypepper • yesterday at 2:22 PM
its linked in the original post as well, but here is an explanation of why activitypub is not a good fit for this problem, by the authors of ForgeFed themselves: https://forgefed.org/blog/actor-programming/
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ActivityPub and atproto are differently shaped. Pitting them against each other is like asking “why need web when we have email”.
ActivityPub is email-shaped. Servers are inboxes sending messages to each other.
atproto is web-shaped. User repositories host data (like personal sites or git/RSS), while apps aggregate from repositories (like Google Reader).
Different topologies lead to different properties. Eg atproto lets user change hosting with no disruption in app experience. atproto also lets anyone build new apps aggregating over existing data.
ActivityPub doesn’t allow either of those things. It’s literally a bunch of small centralized coupled hosting+app services messaging each other.