atproto Check-in (Fall 2025)
13 points by steveklabnik
13 points by steveklabnik
I do not expect AT to be the kind of revolutionary dent that BlueSky is hoping to leave in the universe of federated social protocols. It has far too many moving parts for what it does, and I genuinely don't think anybody at the BlueSky offices is willing to admit that.
$100m later and AT is still, roughly, in the same place as last year.
The moving parts are a technical requirement to allow others to replace them, so yeah there are more than other distributed social networks, but for a good reason.
There's also lots of activity around AT in general, so far the crown jewels are tangled.org and leaflet.pub!
I find it funny that it's easier to host a Mastodon instance than piece together a full AT stack. I don't know what these moving parts buy me, and I've followed AT for two, almost three, years now.
You still have centralized choke points for authority all over the stack.
Last I checked despite being "decentralized" the company still had de facto centralized censorship control and had moved to ban various users from the service despite giving the veneer of giving users their own moderation controls where they can appear to opt out of censorship (but actually can't because they can still block things at an even higher level). When I learned this I lost interest, what's the point?
I said this in more detail in some recent threads elsewhere, but I think the thing that trips people up is that ActivityPub/"the Fediverse" is based around individualist approaches while ATProto is building around community/collectivist approaches.
In the case of Mastodon, for example, you're told that the solution if you don't like what your instance is doing is to move to another instance. Or if you can't find one that's run the way you like, to host your own instance, and have full control over it. This is very much catering to each user's individual preference and trying to maximize the level of control an individual can wield over their experience.
By contrast, as I understand it the motivating case for Bluesky/ATProto was to create a Twitter-alike that was resistant to hostile takeover not because someone could spin up their own personal single-user instance of it, but because someone with (a significant but not necessarily prohibitive level of) resources could pick up the whole thing, and run a clone of it, with the social graph, posting history, everything all preserved, and just invite everyone to come continue posting on the clone.
And so the tooling has been evolving not toward empowering individuals to run their own single-user "instances", but toward empowering communities to do their own thing, either within Bluesky or independently of it. Going fully independent requires more work and requires running a few more things, but it's doable and they're working on making it easier. But again the whole point is that it's an entire community, like Blacksky, which wants to set up a space for themselves run according to community norms, rather than each individual wanting their own individual "instance" with their own individual rules.
And ultimately Bluesky's ability to "censor", as you put it, is just the ability to control what's seen by people using their relay and app view. That's no different than, say, the admin of Mastodon instance A blocking someone on instance B, or all of instance B; it affects everyone who's on instance A, and affects the relevant account(s) on instance B since they can no longer interact with people on instance A.
Re your last paragraph I didn't mean to imply mastodon was better. The politicking around instances banning each other is similar.
And to be clear it is unambiguously censorship. I hate the dressing up of "someone else gets to decide what you read" as "empowering communities." If it were empowering me it would give me features as a user to help me filter what I want to read, not make it so an admin can decide I should never see something.
Bluesky chooses which accounts to host and show on their infrastructure. Same as a Mastodon admin does. Same as moderators of any service.
You have the right to build your own soapbox. You've never had the right to demand access to someone else's.
Yes I've heard that dishonest framing many times. That argument only works when the person is complaining about not being allowed to post things. If you go back and read my comment again you'll see that's not what I did, I complained as a reader. Every Mastodon and Bluesky admin who wants to tell me what I can read is a censor.
You can stand up your own thing and read whoever's opinions you like on it. You can offer it to others, too, if you like.
Somehow, the people who insist they're being unfairly censored rarely manage to get the audience they feel they deserve even when they do set up their own thing, and generally try to get back onto someone else's platform again.
But also I doubt very much that your mind is open to alternate perspectives on this.
Would you feel the same way if Comcast or Verizon were making your argument? "You are free to build your own cell towers and dig your own fiber optic lines..."
Common carriers are regulated differently and generally are expected to provide a neutral "pipe" to anyone who pays their bill, but even they have exceptions and can deny service to someone.
And Bluesky is nowhere near the same category of entity, and you know that.
Yes and the neutral system works very well! Notice that you're trying to come up with legal justifications so we can parse a technical difference in order to make it legal to do the censorship. You're not actually arguing that censorship is good, just that in this instance the first amendment may not forbid it. That's the whole reason people have latched on to this notion that social media is "more like a publisher" because publishers can be held liable, and that creates a mechanism to de facto force companies to censor. It has nothing to do with whether or not censorship actually accomplishes what people want it to accomplish or whether or not it has other bad downstream effects.
In practice, the power to censor is inevitably abused. Everybody seemed to think it was a foregone conclusion that empowering companies to make censorship choices was going to help prevent misinformation, and then Elon bought Twitter. How did that work out?
If you have access to an internet connection (neutral pipe provided by a common carrier), you can build your own site and publish your opinions on it. And nobody else owes you an audience for it.
That's the key difference, and that's the whole deal. That's how the "marketplace of ideas" works: just as many businesses fail in their markets, many ideas do too, and we don't owe them any sort of bailout to try to maintain them by force as a going concern.
And as I've pointed out, you yourself aren't open to alternative ideas, and so you don't even follow your own principles. You ought to be inviting me into your home to lecture you for hours a day on how wrong you are! But you aren't. And you're just going to run the same handful of arguments over and over again, so I'm going to bow out of this.
"You could run your own site" no actually you can't because the exact same people pushing for the social media censorship will go after your hosting provider. This is the problem with your position, it's not internally consistent, there is no special boundary.
the whole point is that it's an entire community, like Blacksky, which wants to set up a space for themselves run according to community norms, rather than each individual wanting their own individual "instance" with their own individual rules.
What’s the difference between the Blacksky approach and Mastodon instances focused on serving a specific community? Or otherwise, the case when a community is served by a group of instances that federate with each other but ban/are banned by most others (like the ML Lemmy instances).
Not much difference, really, except that the ATProto approach to account migration is lot smoother than the ActivityPub approach. And the fact that culturally, the ActivityPub world tends to focus on schisming into separate instances and ultimately atomizing into "host it yourself" single-user instances where the ATProto world encourages operating at the community level: starter packs, shared feeds, shared moderation lists and labelers, shared alternate relays and app views, etc. rather than everybody running their own individual "instance" of all those things.
Like, the parent poster was apparently very upset that Bluesky has the ability to ban people on Bluesky's instances of those things, but within the confines of "don't do something that gets Bluesky to deploy an account-level ban on you", which is something that would exist on any Mastodon instance too, the ATProto world just offers a ton more tooling for carving out a community space within the Bluesky "instance".