OK, but that raises a question. Can I do that right now? If so, I don't understand why more people are doing this. When I looked into this I definitely didn't see anything like this.
> And an account tied to exactly one of them, that is a pain to migrate if it's even possible with the ActivityPub application you use. This causes decision paralysis and dissuades most people from even considering joining.
I like the concept of W3C DIDs, but it's a little soured for me that there was no real solution to the PLC DID problem. It is, quite literally, the exact opposite of being decentralized. (IIRC they do support one of the other DID methods, but it's not default, and I couldn't figure out how.)
Which seems like a common theme. You can absolutely fix the downsides of the Fediverse, it just requires you to reduce how decentralized the network is :)
> Within what is effectively a rounding error, everyone that uses ActivityPub uses Threads. Blacksky is definitely a larger percentage of the ATProto network than mastodon.social is of the ActivityPub network.
While this is technically correct, Threads is not widely considered an instance in the Fediverse and is missing in "instance lists". Threads is less like a part of the Fediverse and more like a centralized social media service service that supports interoperability with ActivityPub.
> True! Just like if there were hypothetically only two ATProto applications, that would not be very interesting. I think I've used four or five ATProto applications with my identity? Pretty cool stuff!
This is cool but not relevant. I'm more specifically talking about Bluesky vs the Fediverse here, when referring to the protocols. Obviously there are also uses of ActivityPub that are not Mastodon/Misskey as well.
I haven't seen another ATProto application that I found interesting enough to try yet.
> There is nothing in the protocol enforcing this and this expectation has been broken in the past.
> https://github.com/tuskyapp/Tusky/issues/2224
I never suggested it was literally impossible for someone to do it... but the concept of a "Mastodon" app is inherently agnostic to the instance in a way that Bluesky's apps are not.
> This is in addition to the fact that "clients" in ActivityPub extend to the monolithic instance itself, and therefore is also broken by the very "defederation" you already mentioned!
Sure. I'm suggesting you can't actually have decentralization without the possibility of all of ActivityPub's downsides. You can't use technical means to fix the social problems with decentralization; you can only defacto centralize things.
> I am very familiar with ActivityPub. I don't hate it. I ran multiple instances for years (one for my friends, and one for my family). ATProto is simply more flexible (allows applications to scale up to provide an experience that one would expect coming from centralized applications) and easier for non-technical people to use. And it's decentralized, which is awesome.
ATProto is decentralized, at least to some extent.
Bluesky isn't really, though.
How is comparing Mastodon/the Fediverse and Bluesky unfair? Are you kind of admitting that Bluesky isn't actually practically decentralized by suggesting the AP analog of Bluesky is the largest Mastodon instance rather than the federation of them? This seems to contradict what you and much of the marketing around Bluesky says.
Where do I login to ATProto. It's not an application. It's a network of applications.
Where do I login to Bluesky? https://bsky.app
Where do I login to Mastodon.social? https://mastodon.social
People use apps, not networks of apps. Saying you don't care about the broader ATmosphere is exactly the same as saying you don't care about the broader Fediverse. That's fine, but then let's compare apps to apps instead of an app to a network. How does bsky.app compare against mastodon.social? (Actually let's not do that, because comparing a single app in a decentralized network to a single app in another decentralized network is pretty boring).
> Are you kind of admitting that Bluesky isn't actually practically decentralized
The data is meaningfully decentralized (more so than any AP app). The user identity is meaningfully decentralized (more so than any AP app). Moderation is meaningfully decentralized (similarly to AP apps). Independently developed applications are meaningfully interoperable (more so than most AP apps, especially leveraging DIDs). People can and do run their own AT infrastructure all the time. Ask questions instead of trying to pin people with gotchas based on incorrect assumptions.
I'm comparing two supposedly decentralized microblogging platforms, Bluesky and Mastodon (and compatible microblogging software.)
The things in your post don't hold up. For example, people log into apps. OK. So when I log into my email account using Thunderbird, that's decentralized. Right? Literally I am using a client to connect to some IMAP+SMTP server. Couldn't be more decentralized.
So now let's say I log into gmail.com. That's still email. Is email still decentralized with the existence of gmail? Well, it is less so than it maybe should be, but absolutely! Because I actually use Fastmail. That's what a federated network looks like.
When I log into Matrix, I still use Element regardless of homeserver. I can use any instance of Element, or install it to my machine. But still, it's Element. That's what a federated network looks like.
Not all decentralized things are federated. Some of them are, for example, peer to peer, and many other architectures.
I am ignoring the broader ATmosphere because it is not part of Bluesky the microblogging network. There are also plenty of ActivityPub applications that are not Mastodon-compatible microblogging networks, and I'm not talking about those either. I'm not talking about, for example, the network of Peertube instances that are also using ActivityPub.
I fully admit that I am not an ATProto expert, but if you're not running a Bluesky compatible AppView that speaks the Bluesky schemas, you are not participating in Bluesky, which is what I am talking about specifically.
I have used the terms "ATproto" and "ActivityPub" only in the context of Bluesky/compatible and Mastodon/compatible. That is it. If you wanted to argue about something else, it is not me pulling a gotcha on you to refuse. I just simply don't care, and you are not taking the hint. It's my damn comment thread, I know what my intended scope was. I know, too, you must know that Bluesky itself is supposed to be meaningfully decentralized, such that you can indeed run your own entire appview stack and still be a part of Bluesky, so you must understand that what I am doing is inherently an apples to apples comparison.
Yet when I log into Bluesky using a Bluesky app, what I get is the Bluesky appview and Bluesky moderation service. This is because Bluesky is substantially more centralized than the Fediverse. You can kick. You can scream. It doesn't matter. Bluesky. Is. Centralized.
> The data is meaningfully decentralized (more so than any AP app). The user identity is meaningfully decentralized (more so than any AP app). Moderation is meaningfully decentralized (similarly to AP apps). Independently developed applications are meaningfully interoperable (more so than most AP apps, especially leveraging DIDs). People can and do run their own AT infrastructure all the time. Ask questions instead of trying to pin people with gotchas based on incorrect assumptions.
With all due respect, to the extent that there is any, no thank you.