Fediverse is the over-engineered great solutions that most people don’t understand
I tried to explain the Fediverse to the marketing department at my company and the looks of confusion just made me gave up.
“It’s like email. We have our company domain and others have theirs and it all just works”
That’s a great start to an explanation, but first, you are assuming that people know how email works, and second, unlike email, federated social media has discovery, feeds, and in general content that gets pushed to you. How all of that works can be complicated and if you join a small instance, you may not realize how much content you are missing because of it.
The analogy the other day works well, aside from the LaTeX one which still feels like a stretch
- Firefox : Chrome
- Linux : Windows
- LaTex : MS Word
- actual Fediverse : Bluesky’s Fediverseᵀᴹ
However I’m happy to be here. Mastodon is getting a boost right now too. Even if they didn’t, and everyone on Twitter moved to bluesky, I don’t expect those instances to close up shop
https://atproto.com/guides/applications
You can use atproto to build other federated applications.
Just because one implementation of atproto (bluesky) doesn’t have feature parity, doesn’t mean it’s a fake federated protocol.
‘actual fediverse’ and ‘bluesky fediverse’ doesn’t make sense as a comparison.
It’s more like, ActivityPub vs ATProto.
https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto
Bluesky is just one implementation of the protocol, that implementation happens to have a lot of steam, but it’s not fake or anything.
I wouldn’t call it fake, but the concern is about who created, maintains, and/or controls the protocol
ActivityPub was developed by W3C, and it’s properly decentralized. For Atproto, the concern is that Bluesky will exert control over the protocol once shareholders and profit get in the way of making a good product.
Last I heard they were discussing potentially moving the necessary registry/directory to a separate non-profit “like ICANN”, but even with that they seemed noncommittal about it.
I’d love to see more diversity in the federated space. Competition and iterative development is how we make things better. But I need Bluesky to take those necessary steps before I feel comfortable endorsing it over ActivityPub
