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Erlend

@mmasnick @mike My biggest issue with Bluesky, isn't their ideas (some aren't great - but some are). It's that they chose to fragment open social media, instead of improving the standard already backed by the W3C.

It's like if the comic in the article said: "Isn't it cool how these islands are connected? Well, instead of connecting to them, we started a new island chain!"

I fear two smaller networks has a lower chance against the silos than one more robust. 😕

@Erlend I think multiple competing protocols is a good thing. It forces them to evolve and improve.

And, in some cases, you MUST use a different protocol to get certain features.

For example, Hubzilla has nomadic identity which allows you to migrate your account to another server, or even clone your account and have it synced on another server. You can't do that in ActivityPub, but you can do that with the Zot protocol. And several platforms are adopting federated single sign on. You can't do that with ActivityPub either. You need something like OpenWebAuth. If you want to support offline devices, you need a protocol like Scuttlebutt.

ActivityPub is great at doing what it does... but it won't cover all of the use cases out there.

I think that eventually these different open source networks will interconnect, but I don't think that there will be one protocol that serves all purposes.

@scott I'm not saying we can't have any other protocols - like, https is still fine in my book. 😛 But ATProto is so similar to to AP, that I fear it would be better to instead improve AP.

I think two competing protocols would be beneficial if it weren't for the case that the main competitor (which is countless times larger and more powerful) is "no protocol".

@Erlend There actually are more than two competing protocols. ActivityPub, AT Protocol, Zot Protocol, and Nomad Protocol (just to name a few) all do the same things, but with different implementations and different feature sets.

We are implementing Zot protocol and ActivityPub on all of our servers because ActivityPub doesn't support nomadic identity but Zot does. The only reason we use ActivityPub is to connect to servers not using Zot, because Zot does everything ActivityPub does and more. Eventually we plan on adding AT Protocol as well. Our servers will be multi-protocol to take advantage of features ActivityPub hasn't added (yet?).

Until ActivityPub implements the features we need, we're backing the Zot protocol instead, and Bluesky will be backing AT Protocol instead. Maybe our competing protocols will pressure ActivityPub to implement things like nomadic identity and/or portable identity. Things we have been asking for for years now.

@scott I guess what I fear, is that getting people away from the silos over to something open, is even harder if the open stuff is fragmented. And that you gotta balance that vs the protocols getting better due to competition.

However - I 100 % hope you are right and I'm wrong! 😁 And work towards the bridges (between the island chains 😉) getting better and more seemless, makes that more true. 👍🏻
@mike

@Erlend Since our software supports multiple-protocols, the user perspective is typically that they get advanced functionality if they use our software and when they interact with other people who use our software and they lose the advanced features when interacting with someone on another platform.

The downside of this is that people who use single-protocol platforms won't necessarily see the whole conversation, and if they do, they won't be able to interact with the users using the other protocol directly. For example, a Mastodon user might see a comment from a Bluesky user in the conversation, but the Mastodon and Bluesky users can't talk to each other directly, even though our users can talk to both.

Although discussion groups and forums work a bit better, since users post messages on the forum, and the forum sends the messages to all members of the forum. Users on the different protocols still can't talk to each other directly, but they will see the whole conversation on the forum, and will be able to reply to each other via the forum.

A bridge could possibly be built to allow users of different protocols to talk to one another.

I think in the future, platforms will need to be aware that posts from other protocols might make it into their stream, and change the UI to indicate whether you can reply to them directly or not. Ideally, a webfinger lookup should tell you what protocols are supported.

It is not perfect, but a solution can be created if we put our mind to it.

@havn @mike i know, firsthand, that they very, very, very seriously tried to see if they could make activitypub work for what they wanted to do and concluded it just didn't fit what they needed.

And I see a couple of different protocols as a bonus, as each pushes the other to do better things.