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1. verdve+t2[view] [source] 2026-02-03 17:23:51
>>crimso+(OP)
Are you aware of the current efforts by researchers on Bluesky to build a new researchers platform on ATProto? (Forget the project name at the moment)

If not, same handle over there, I can get you in touch with them. Or hit up Boris, he knows everyone and is happy to make connections

There's also a full day at the upcoming conference on ATProto & scientific related things. I think they com on discourse more (?)

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2. nosuch+6Z1[view] [source] 2026-02-04 04:18:34
>>verdve+t2
Isn't ATProto just a compromised version of Activity Pub, basically designed around an excuse to force all users into a data mining firehose structure like twitter used to have only there's no privacy features or federation for moderation controls?
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3. southe+Rn2[view] [source] 2026-02-04 08:11:07
>>nosuch+6Z1
Disclaimer: i'm rather hostile to ATProto for reinventing the wheel without bringing much value over AP/XMPP/Matrix.

I don't think that's a fair characterization. Most AP implementations famously don't have privacy features: it was by design (and therefore no surprise to us tech folks), but i remember it was quite the scandal when users found out Mastodon instance admins could read users' private messages. A later "scandal" involved participation in the EUNOMIA research project about "provenance tracking" in federated networks [1], which to be fair to conspiracy theorists does sound like an academic front for NSA-style firehose R&D.

That being said, Bluesky is much harder to selfhost and is therefore not decentralized in practice. [2] See also Blacksky development notes. However, Bluesky does bring a very interesting piece to the puzzle which AP carefully ignored despite years of research in AP-adjacent protocols (such as Hubzilla): account portability.

All in all, i'm still siding on the ActivityPub ecosystem because i think it's much more ethical and friendly in all regards, and i'm really sad so many so-called journalists, researchers and leftists jumped ship to Bluesky just because the attraction of "Twitter reborn" (with the same startup nation vibes) was too strong. At least in my circles, i did not meet a single person who mentioned the choice of Bluesky was about UX or features.

But now, i'm slowly warming up to the ATmosphere having a vibrant development community. Much more so than AP. And to be fair to ATProto, it is worse than AP from a centralization standpoint, but at least it's not as bad and complex as the matrix protocol which brought 0 value over AP/XMPP but made implementations 100x more complex and resource-intensive.

[1] https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/825171/reporting

[2] https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/

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4. verdve+ZH3[view] [source] 2026-02-04 16:41:00
>>southe+Rn2
> But now, i'm slowly warming up to the ATmosphere having a vibrant development community.

I build in the ATmosphere because I want to effect change. AP was hostile, Nostr is for crypto bros. The @dev community is one of the strongest pieces and attractors

One way I like to think about how the protocol is different is that they made a giant event system for the public content and then let anyone plug in anywhere they want

https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers

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