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pfraze 14 hours ago [-]
Just want to add that the AT Protocol IETF working group has been formed, and the PLC directory independent organization and board has officially been established. I’m at the closing talk for this years Atmosphere Conference as I write this and it’s really an incredible community of devs.
laurex 8 hours ago [-]
I'm excited to see communities of developers working to build things that are meaningful and matter to regular people, which ATProto seems to have more of than some other ecosystems in decent tech land. And where else could you attend an awesome workshop on "Hospicing Social Media?"
danpalmer 14 hours ago [-]
I can really get behind this positive take on ATProto and the ecosystem. I know there was early criticism, but much of that stems from the project taking a fairly long-term viewpoint early on, and then having to work their way towards fulfilling that. We're now at that point, and the model looks great.
dinakernel 9 hours ago [-]
The best part was the Doom running over AT Protocol.
Jetstream is a bit patchy, but running Doom - I would never have thought it possible
marcus_holmes 8 hours ago [-]
What's the trade-off between this and ActivityPub?
I might be being cynical but I think I've seen this story play out before. Did Bluesky genuinely believe that AP wouldn't work for their use-case, or did they want to own the protocol?
davexunit 3 hours ago [-]
On one hand atproto has content-addressed storage and portable identity that AP still lacks (but could have!), on the other hand atproto is far more centralized. The data layer is decentralized but everything on top is effectively centralized. Phrases like "practical decentralization" and "credible exit" are used to describe this design.
A couple of pretty good reasons (except the one about lexicons IMHO), but I don’t think it’s reasonable to believe the maker of a 15th standard was “right” about not using the previous 14s. As far as I understand, all the use cases described in OP’s article can be fulfilled with ActivityPub.
I’d love to see an article showing use cases in both AtProto and ActivityPub and showing why AtProto is the superior choice.
(To me, the hype for AT protocol vs. ActivityPub feels like the hype for DevEnv vs. Nix – I’m slightly upset that the latter isn’t taking off because the former decides to do its own thing and not contribute to the base projects. I’d love to be convinced wrong!)
Kye 3 hours ago [-]
Wide C2S and ActivityPods support would address most of what led to the creation of AT. Lacking that, they made AT.
The rest is revealed in the developer community. AT and AP followed similar timelines for the first year or so, then diverged.
The main thing I heard from AP devs is that it's hard even before dealing with Mastodon quirks for any meaningful connection to the AP network. AP's early developer energy looks like AT's now, except AT's has been sustained for years and is only growing.
AP hasn't even managed a second conference, and that's where all the big AT stuff started at its first one. For example: Streamplace was new and awkward to use last year. This year, it was the official streaming platform with three simultaneous streams and had integration with the official ticketing system. I can't even list all the AT platforms people used to coordinate, trade info, etc during the conference. None of them had to deal with a clunky API since it's all JSON in a standard format on your PDS through a standard interface.
Since this re-surfaced from the second chance queue, this is a good place to say they just announced the first and very important steps to an independent PLC directory: https://martianbase.net/@mackuba/116314877708269740
I don’t get this post at all. Just because the Bluesky people opted to call things “open” doesn’t make it so. ATproto helps the open web as much as NFTs and DAPs did before it.
I might be being cynical but I think I've seen this story play out before. Did Bluesky genuinely believe that AP wouldn't work for their use-case, or did they want to own the protocol?
https://atproto.com/guides/faq#why-not-use-activity-pub
I’d love to see an article showing use cases in both AtProto and ActivityPub and showing why AtProto is the superior choice.
(To me, the hype for AT protocol vs. ActivityPub feels like the hype for DevEnv vs. Nix – I’m slightly upset that the latter isn’t taking off because the former decides to do its own thing and not contribute to the base projects. I’d love to be convinced wrong!)
The rest is revealed in the developer community. AT and AP followed similar timelines for the first year or so, then diverged.
The main thing I heard from AP devs is that it's hard even before dealing with Mastodon quirks for any meaningful connection to the AP network. AP's early developer energy looks like AT's now, except AT's has been sustained for years and is only growing.
AP hasn't even managed a second conference, and that's where all the big AT stuff started at its first one. For example: Streamplace was new and awkward to use last year. This year, it was the official streaming platform with three simultaneous streams and had integration with the official ticketing system. I can't even list all the AT platforms people used to coordinate, trade info, etc during the conference. None of them had to deal with a clunky API since it's all JSON in a standard format on your PDS through a standard interface.
VODs are coming soon: https://bsky.app/profile/iame.li/post/3miahg7vlgs2w
From the alt text:
Initial board
- Bryan Newbold - Bluesky, protocol engineer
- Richard Barnes - Co-founder Let's Encrypt, Co-author MLS, ACME, HPKE, etc
- Wendy Seltzer - Internet Lawyer & open standards advocate
- Filippo Valsorda - Cryptographer, Go cryptography maintainer, transparency log aficionado
- Thyla van der Merwe - Cryptographer, security & privacy engineer at Google
This is on top of the IETF working group news: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/atp/about/
https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/05/executive-dysfunction/