10 ms·

I'm betting on ATProto

164 points by speckx 8mo ago

verdverm 8mo ago
I bet on ATProto the last year, I've left this year. The network has been shrinking and the Bluesky leadership has been misleading about "user" numbers and hiding that they took private equity money. The atmo fund looks like a bunch of self dealing. I no longer trust any of them. This year, I'm betting less social media as being better and in the long-run a new protocol that learns from the mistakes.
- chokolad 8mo ago
  > This year, I'm betting less social media as being better and in the long-run a new protocol that learns from the mistakes. Can you list protocol level mistakes made by ATProto?
  - verdverm 8mo ago
    Permissioned data is probably the most fundamental, the part I looked most deeply into myself. People want privacy over blasting everything out to the internet for anyone to scrape. The public by default forced upon users is a bad choice. The purported benefits never materialized. Many of the atmo developers have this belief they can skip the network effects, grift the data and social graph for their own use. Here's the User Intent proposal that is super easy to implement, yet they have been sitting on it since: https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/discussions/3617 https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/discussions/3617 This would have been at least a middle ground to permissioned data, as would have been personal private data (bsky prefs generalized). After that money, which I see as less of a protocol thing. A protocol or platform has to enable the people to make way more money than itself, at least 10x. (1) Bluesky should have created subscriptions for their service, they wouldn't have needed the private equity had they. (2) Bluesky did more to block others making money than enable it. Graze was in talks with them to enable the creators using their feed system to make money, until Bluesky walked away. (3) Permissioned data would unlock monetization without blockchain. Permissioned data is being worked on, but the commentary from Bluesky is not promising. (1) Nobody in ATProto has built a permission system (that I'm aware of) (2) Bluesky are proposing a very simplistic system. This will put burden on app developers and create opposition the credible exit philosophy. Record history / editing. The former should be at the protocol level, the later on feature that is highly desired, possible today, but they resist with fervor. Bluesky could have put way more funding into the ecosystem, especially in hindsight with the $100M they picked up just after peak. Now they are struggling and stepping on that ecosystem, re: replacing Graze instead of supporting and integrating them with their latest "ai" stunt. Compare this to Hytale and what they are doing. Night and day. The Bluesky team has also made several PR mistakes, upsetting their base, they are really tone deaf. Hope the waffles are tasty!
    - verdverm 8mo ago
      The PLC comes up a lot, and I understand the criticism, but it is also good enough for now and on the right trajectory, though the pace could be better, hut like much of the Bluesky development it has molasses in winter vibes. Long-term, multiple identity authorities can exist. Something like Handshake would have been ideal, another great project doomed by poor leadership. Supporting delete is a good decision in my opinion, and likely a legal requirement. I also like that ATProto stuck a balance between decentralized and user experience. Properly federated systems are unlikely to appeal to the masses, re: blockchain. Two other well designed parts of ATProto are how the algos and moderation work. Modular, composable, and anyone can participate. This would change with a properly permissioned protocol (zanzibar + macaroons imo) and encourage smaller social instead of big social.
    - pfraze 8mo ago
      [flagged]
      - verdverm 8mo ago
        [dead]
  - kevinak 7mo ago
    Not parent but I wrote an article about how PDSs (the thing that hosts your data) control your signing and rotation keys. It's technically possible to self-host but as always, the default becomes the norm. 99.999% of users on ATProto host their data on BlueSky servers. https://kevinak.se/blog/who-actually-owns-your-atproto-identity-hint-its-probably-not-you https://kevinak.se/blog/who-actually-owns-your-atproto-ident...
sieabahlpark 8mo ago
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hresvelgr 8mo ago
Focusing on protocol and decentralisation is putting the cart before the horse. The reason why Twitter, and Reddit in particular work so well is because of sub-communities that form organically. More importantly, discovery was part of the value in using it. It's why every Mastodon community specific to one niche/subject is not very interesting, people are not one single interest, we follow someone we like for one reason, maybe it's they make cool art, then we find out they also make music too, then bam, you discover a new genre of music and the community around it. Decentralisation actively introduces friction into the most rewarding loop of the entire thing. Centralisation isn't the problem, it's just comorbid with shitty governance.
- phoronixrly 8mo ago
  > The reason why Twitter, and Reddit in particular work so well is because of sub-communities that form organically. Which sub-communities are on Twitter right now?
  - throwaway85825 8mo ago
    It seems like most of Japan.
    - verdverm 8mo ago
      Japanese is the second most used language on Bluesky https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.dev/bsky_langs.html https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.d...
      - esbranson 8mo ago
        Is the same algorithmic connectivity with Japanese happening on Bluesky as it is on Twitter, or are Bluesky's algorithms just as opaque as Twitter's?
        verdverm 8mo ago
esbranson 8mo ago
I was disappointed by the hard divergence from core aspects of Tim Berners-Lee‘s vision (and its current implementations) of a Web 3.0 but oh well. Threads got on board, and it’s not to say the missing parts can’t be bolted on later. In particular any future W3C Linked Web Storage WG protocols.[1] [1] https://www.w3.org/groups/wg/lws/ https://www.w3.org/groups/wg/lws/
CqtGLRGcukpy 8mo ago
I've realized not to bet on any social media. For example, pre-Elon Twitter, I thought Twitter was going to around a long time and I would continue to use it for many years. I left Twitter when Elon bought it. While I'm on various social media sites now, I can fairly easily pick up a new one as I see fit. And if my audience doesn't want to follow me there, they don't have to. And I can find different people to follow on that new one. You never know what is going to happen.
- calvinmorrison 8mo ago
  if you are always looking for new 'audiences' it's probably just media and not social media. I use hubs my peers and friends use. IRC, email and for the boomers - Facebook.
charcircuit 8mo ago
X just unified the feed across languages such that all posts automatically get translated for users. These kinds of innovations are much more important than the ability to be able to switch apps.
- desireco42 8mo ago
  Absolutely agree, but as technologists our instict is to solve problem as technical, not as social.
  - verdverm 8mo ago
    Is it the "when all you have is a hammer..." issue?
- _lvbh 8mo ago
  Did it? Just checked and my feed is still completely untranslated. I have my settings set as English. I hope they don't do the weird YouTube thing of translating things from languages you know into the language you set. Multilingual people exist
  - charcircuit 8mo ago
    The feature only rolled out to me today and I think it started rolling out to people only a couple days ago.
  - numpad0 8mo ago
    It's only rolling out in past 1-2 days, and also English speaking users are already running low on sanity from being constantly exposed to Japanosphere norms. We'll see how long this experiment is going to last...
- blactuary 8mo ago
  It's a nazi website. Before I left they started allowing people to call me the n-word
busterarm 8mo ago
I am all-in on face to face relationships and no longer investing in the fiction of socializing with people through a screen (or only over the phone). And I've been here since low baud modem days and through every niche internet community and medium you can think of. Eventually I decided to prioritize my health over everything -- job, friends, extended family, hobbies -- transient relationships with things & people just don't matter any longer. If you want community you have to cultivate it and it isn't real if it isn't deeply intertwined with most of your life. Also, owning my own copies of things too, from books to music to video tutorials. It either goes ona shelf or in the NAS and gets indexed.
manifoldgeo 8mo ago
I'd be curious to see how ATProto stacks up against ActivityPub in the long run. I was very excited by the prospects of Mastodon, PeerTube, and a few other Fediverse apps. I even started implementing my own ActivityPub library based on their RFC before I fizzled out. But, the Fediverse never really seemed to take off in the mainstream. Mozilla launched their own mastodon instance around 2023 and then closed it in 2024. I've never heard anything about PeerTube in casual conversation, and Mastodon is not common to hear about either. As someone with a tech degree and a liberal arts degree, I think protocols like this are excellent examples of trying to solve social issues with technology instead of policy or other approaches. I can't tell you what those other approaches would be, but I haven't seen a lot of efficacy from the purely technological ones. Eventually, the pressure of turning a profit always seems to take over, pushing the moral mission aside. Still. I'm rooting for ATProto to speak truth to power and uproot apps like X and Instagram.
- troosevelt 8mo ago
  I think realistically the only people who care about this are a very niche number of hardcore users. I won't be surprised if federated networks never take off. Obviously there are good reasons for normies to care but when the solution is as disjointed as some of the federated stuff has been, it's just not an advantage. You end up with a bunch of idealists/nerds chatting about the same stuff. It's not terrible but the average person does not care. I mean arguably the average person doesn't really post on social media, either. Sometimes I wonder if future generations will consider this all hot air. Really, they're kind of unncessary to begin with, you probably do want an off-ramp but it's better if a centralized service just has good governance and policies that can be affected by users. The current setup is still usually relatively closed entities that are federated. Regarding the awareness of it in the mainstream, I somehow got too high at a local pot shop and ended up chatting with the cashier. He was a former gamedev and knew what quaternions were (we were both confused by them), but I felt deep shame when I mentioned IRC and he clearly had never heard of it. I don't think outside of HN and other niches, people have heard or care about these federated protocols. It's a very nerdy/self-indulgent need to worry about whether all of your Internet writings are accessible via various means.
- pojntfx 8mo ago
tolerance 8mo ago
I think that a lot of people are going to get ATProto whether they want to or not. I don't want to believe that anyone involved with it at in a decision-making or policy-driving capacity is a big enough loser to only want better social media out of it. Decentralized web apps are a proof of concept.
- verdverm 8mo ago
  fyi, Bain Capital (private equity) now has a say in where things go. Technically since April of last year, but we are now just finding out because they withheld their $100M "funding"
  - tolerance 8mo ago
    ahem, Bain Capital "Crypto", to be exact. Among others. https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-19-2026-series-b https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-19-2026-series-b Did not know that Bloomberg was into VC now.
    - verdverm 8mo ago
      Bain Capital subsidiaries are still Bain Capital. Crypto makes it even less appealing imo.
apitman 8mo ago
> Social media was supposed to connect us, but most of it has turned into ads, division, and loneliness. I'm betting on ATProto as a way to fix that I disagree with the premise here. I think the core mechanics of social media, ie instant communication between random strangers about random topics, creates toxic interactions regardless of whether it's manipulated by engagement algorithms. Some of the most toxic conversations I've seen were on Mastodon. If there's a healthy future for socializing on the internet, I think it will happen in small communities. That will slow down dissemination of information, but maybe that would be a good thing.
- verdverm 8mo ago
  I'm not convinced it is social media wholesale, rather it is about size. Platforms like microblogging are more about the person, the quips, the dunking. If you are in any small communities using social platforms like Discord/Signal (chat rooms) or Discourse (forum), it's a very different feel. Most are genuinely positive experiences. I suppose it depends on how one defines social media. My definitions are more flexible than they used to be.
  - packetlost 8mo ago
    Once someone builds a reasonable Google+ clone on ATProto or ActivityPub I'd probably switch to that. I don't think we've solved reputation when it comes to decentralized identity providers yet either.
    - verdverm 8mo ago
      For real, trust online is an open and hard problem. It's only going to get harder with ai bots running amok.
      - packetlost 8mo ago
        I have some serious designs for a federated reputation system that is, as far as I can tell, novel but I haven't had time to really refine it and develop a proof of concept. Just a pile of notes for now
garethsprice 8mo ago
How does ATProto solve the problems that the last 10–20 years have shown seem intrinsic to all social media once it hits a certain scale? For example: A simple simulation of social networks rapidly reproduced three well-documented dysfunctions: partisan echo chambers, concentrated influence among a small elite, and amplification of polarized voices - creating a "social media prism" that distorts political discourse. Notably, all attempts at conscious intervention failed to help or made things worse. [1] Rather than fostering closer relationships, the algorithms and structures underlying social media platforms inadvertently contribute to profound psychological harm - particularly among teenagers, who are disproportionately affected by curated online personas, peer pressure to present a perfect digital image, and constant notification bombardment. [2] And from Meta's own internal UX research, surfaced in recent harm-related court filings: researchers described Instagram as functionally a drug, users as binging to the point of reward deficit, and the platform's role as that of a pusher. [3] I've gradually opted out of social media over the last few years. That Meta internal research was the thing that finally pushed me to delete IG, the last social app I was still using. My life has been noticeably calmer and better adjusted since - which makes me skeptical that a better protocol, rather than a fundamentally different relationship with technology and socialization, is our way out of the current mess. [1] https://arxiv.org/html/2508.03385v1 https://arxiv.org/html/2508.03385v1 [2] https://scholar.dsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1222&context=ccspapers https://scholar.dsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1222&con... [3] https://www.lieffcabraser.com/pdf/2025-11-21-Brief-dckt-2480_0.pdf https://www.lieffcabraser.com/pdf/2025-11-21-Brief-dckt-2480... (p. 33)
- verdverm 8mo ago
  The credible exit allows for real competition. In other words you can own your identity and data, apps store content in your database, and you can swap out apps that enshittify, eg. there are many alternative clients for bluesky data. The design of feeds (algos) and labellers (moderation) is unique and one of the best parts of the protocol. There are also interesting applications for inter-app features, a double edged sword, i.e. good for content creators but bad for something like linkedin.
  - ninjagoo 8mo ago
gregjw 8mo ago
I think I just need to be less online, I've kind of lost hope.
rchaud 8mo ago
Isn't this just reinventing the wheel of a website, an email list and a message board? Are the scientists referenced in this article really so averse to having a website or corresponding via email that they need a social media instance to chat with every Tom, Dick and Harry that can't put up with the friction of clicking a mailto: link? How did that go during Covid, when everyone on Twitter suddenly became an infectious disease specialist? > So you could use another app like Blacksky and have the same exact posts, comments, and likes that you do on Bluesky. And if you ever decide that you don’t like what Bluesky is doing [...] you can move somewhere else, keeping your followers, connections, and content. How is that different from moving to a new web host or newsletter provider? And what happens if your Bluesky connections don't move over to the new thing? Or if Bluesky chooses to create a read-only archive of your posts and changes the UI to obscure the ATproto ID or whatever it is that certifies the content as being "yours"?
- verdverm 8mo ago
  https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers This article does a good job of explaining some nuanced differences. Tl;dr - ATProto (public data) can be viewed as a distributed event bus that anyone can plug-n-play into. It's a good design imo
ninjagoo 8mo ago
Not trustworthy. The providers mentioned in the article, blacksky and bluesky, presumably the most visible ones, do not allow signups with anonymous email providers even though they make you pass a human verification step. The link in the article for Blacksky (blackskyweb.xyz) has a dark pattern that attempts to get you sign up for bluesky instead of blacksky. Odd. The bigger issue is funding - currently appears to be VC funded (seed round 2023, Series A 2024), so they'll want a return at some point. Voilà, enshittification. The biggest selling point - portable identity - is a mirage because the current providers do not give you the cryptographic keys to your identity. So they can simply lock you down, and your 'identity' is done.
- verdverm 8mo ago
  > The biggest selling point - portable identity - is a mirage because the current providers do not give you the cryptographic keys to your identity. So they can simply lock you down, and your 'identity' is done. Here is one of many sites that help users de-risk, backup, and migrate: https://pdsmoover.com/ https://pdsmoover.com/
  - ninjagoo 8mo ago
    > Here is one of many sites that help users de-risk, backup, and migrate Unfortunately, doesn't work if you're already locked out ... And, you have to give this 3rd party site your username and password. Ouch.
    - verdverm 8mo ago
      You can use `goat` for a CLI version: https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lj7jmt2ct72r https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lj7jmt2ct72r I'm not sure if OAuth gives access to the account management APIs. Certainly much could be improved. Nudging users would be a good notification within the Bluesky app, like one of those on boarding task lists that doesn't have to be completed to get started, but remains visible until you complete or discard them. goat has since moved to a dedicated repository: https://github.com/bluesky-social/goat https://github.com/bluesky-social/goat There is also an adversarial path (when the PDS will not play nice), but it requires setting up a rotation key and having a repo backup ahead of time. https://www.da.vidbuchanan.co.uk/blog/adversarial-pds-migration.html https://www.da.vidbuchanan.co.uk/blog/adversarial-pds-migrat...
CobrastanJorji 8mo ago
I haven't really tried doing anything with ATProto, but I do regularly see content from some folks who are into it, and the thing I like about ATProto is how generally cheerful and friendly and happy the ATProto community is. They're out there with all of the zeal of the old blockchain devs, except without the inky black evil of that movement. Mind you, being a happy community mostly means projects that are either doomed or else ridiculous (looking at you, Doom-on-ATProto guys), but it feels like giddy old school hacks, and that makes me smile.
- skybrian 8mo ago
  The people doing the building seem pretty positive, but on Bluesky there are some pretty vocal complainers who apparently hate everything.
- verdverm 8mo ago
  One of the reasons I stopped hanging out in the "atmosphere" (the name for the broader, community driven ecosystem) is that I was personally attacked three times. The last straw was one of the leadership team jumping down my throat because I used the phrase "marketplace of ideas" that apparently triggered this individual. It's not all pleasant. For me, I have a 3rd time's the charm rule I typically follow. Others may have more or less tolerance for this sort of thing.
gmerc 8mo ago
We are still betting on technology to fix society scale problems I see.
- jauntywundrkind 8mo ago
  To me this looks like betting on using open interoperation to allow people to keep finding systems, moderation, algorithms, tools, and apps that work, that give them control and personal sovereignty over their personal data servers. I don't think we've had many times where we actually give people a chance. Sure Twitter didn't used to cost $40k a year for API access, but it still had gobs of restrictions on what you could look at and do. It still was Twitter's moderation & feeds. The whole experience here is up for remake, perpetually. It is the anti-stagnant, the anti-rot that besets all these controlled systems.
gnarlouse 8mo ago
> I don’t think any social media platform was designed to do this. But it’s where most of them have ended up. They were, quite literally, designed to do this. They needed to monetize the user base to pay for the server costs. Zuck wanted a business.
bjt 8mo ago
I like the future that the ATProto evangelists are painting. I would love for it to happen. But I am skeptical that a protocol is going to solve an incentive problem. In the beginning Twitter was very free and open with API access. There were plenty of alternative apps. Of course, that changed when they got serious about monetizing. Would it really be any harder for Bluesky to switch from ATProto to a proprietary API than it was for Twitter to close their API? How many users are realistically going to download their archives and upload them to some other provider? If most people are using the website or official app, that's where the stickiness is. There would be a blog post with a title like "Supporting the Bluesky Community for the Next Century" and how it's better to have a centralized site that can feed its employees than an idealistic decentralized one that disappears. Things would seem OK at first. But enough years of chasing quarterly KPIs would put them in the same spot as Twitter and Facebook.
- skybrian 8mo ago
  The Bluesky API's are much more open than the Twitter API's ever were. There are people building alternate implementations of the entire stack. The alternatives don't have many users (maybe a few hundred to a few thousand), but the infrastructure is pretty far along.
- jimbokun 8mo ago
  About the same number as would fork an open source project. So not very many. But the possibility of doing so is invaluable.
  - verdverm 8mo ago
    The phrase "hard fork" has come up before in the ecosystem, and outside of it with others who've stepped back and watch to see how things unfold.
davidw 8mo ago
> It was incredible to see all of these people with very different backgrounds and interests coming together for one common goal: making the world better with technology. I feel that's been kind of absent for a while. Sure, tech is huge and there are niches, but the general zeitgeist. Like... the tech world went from this kind of niche thing, to "hey, hackers, you could set yourself up by creating a company and then get to do what you want", which then shifted more and more towards companies, and is right now lurching towards a world where you must pay a mega AI corporation if you want your output to be competitive.
andrewstuart 8mo ago
I found it easier just to drop social networks entirely. I don’t need it so much to seek an alternative.
zhivota 8mo ago
The only social stuff I interact with anymore is a private forum that's paid, which is by far the best discussion on the internet for me, and other than that some discord servers for games I play. Global social networks are cancer no matter the protocol, that's my opinion after many years trying to carve out a use for them in my life. No matter how hard I try to curate my feeds, inevitably they make me more angry, sad, and combative in my online life.
- jordwest 8mo ago
  I tend to agree, I’ve been thinking a lot over the years that this is the way we get out of this mess - lots and lots of smaller independently owned forums that splinter off onto small communities instead of monolithic single-identity mechanisms like social media & to some extent the fediverse. > The only social stuff I interact with anymore is a private forum that's paid Im curious when you say private, do you mean you can only post if you’re a member, or is all post content viewable only by members too? And if the latter, how did you discover the forum, and how did you decide to join?
  - zhivota 8mo ago
    Nothing is accessible to non members. It's only $5/mo and the fee is explicitly to filter out people who don't care enough about the subject matter to pay a nominal fee. I found it because someone I followed in my Twitter days hated how nasty conversations inevitably got there, and wanted a place to have in depth, non-ephemeral conversation with like minded people. These days you'd probably discover it via X where they still post, or their Substack.
cmxch 8mo ago
What does ATProto have that isn’t simply a hermetic barrier against heterodoxy? You have a protocol that makes it easy to concentrate the self-same toxicity it is trying to prevent.
wolvoleo 8mo ago
Will it ever be fully decentralised though? I don't consider it that with a company holding key parts. And a little bit better but still not quite there doesn't do it for me.
nirui 8mo ago
Maybe it's because I watched The Expanse too many times, I'm kinda attracted by their concept of COMM system. Based on how it was depicted, it's a site-to-site (thus P2P) based system that allows encryption, hop-via-proxy and multi-stream transport (embedding files in video call). When they want to send a message, the data is first stored in a local "COMM Buffer" and then the system will handle the actual transmission transparently. The data transceiving can be done in real-time if the participants are near. If not, then it will work similar to how email is exchanged (except the data stream is multimedia, not just text). How is this relates to AT Protocol (and maybe ActivePub)? Well, AT Protocol is designed to be used in "social network" settings, but "social network" was largely evolved from people forwarding emails etc. I think if you could build a really good COMM protocol that allows people exchange information quickly and efficiently, then it should be fairly easy to add social elements on top of it. I think the idea of building a "social network protocol" itself is wrong. People get on social media to do things, maybe it's gather info, maybe it's to learn, maybe it's to make contact etc. Maybe smart people should focus on building a protocol to enable all that, rather than just trying to build something that poorly mimics what the big platform has already perfected. Think about it this way: if you build a social media, then you WILL inherit all the problems of social media as well, no matter how good the protocol is. So maybe just build something else instead then.
- pjc50 8mo ago
  > the data is first stored in a local "COMM Buffer" and then the system will handle the actual transmission transparently. People younger than me may want to read up on UUCP/NNTP/Fidonet systems, which did this. Ideal if you don't have FTL communications, or are just limited to a really slow phone line. > People get on social media to do things, maybe it's gather info, maybe it's to learn, maybe it's to make contact etc. Yes, exactly. There's this odd cognitive dissonance because people who make social networks are really into the process of "making a social network", but for everyone else it's a means to an end, and usually as part of a "community", however that ends up being defined. > Think about it this way: if you build a social media, then you WILL inherit all the problems of social media as well Yes - and those are not new. A certain segment of people are optimistic/privileged enough to not believe the problems are real until it's too late.
rambambram 8mo ago
I'm betting on domain names, HTML and email.
- bullen 8mo ago
  Yes, but we need to decentralize DNS first! And that means making closed port 53 illegal on your home fiber... good luck! Also need to open port 25 outgoing on that same fiber. And we all need routers that run dd-wrt, the problem is all routers that support dd-wrt are sold out because support always comes late in the production cycle. It's hard work to self host, but it's the only work worth doing.
snowpid 8mo ago
Can anyone recommend me aggregators or nice communities from ATProto or ActivityPub? I'd like to become social online.
nottorp 8mo ago
I don't think protocols are the solution. Didn't the original facebook only show you posts of friends? Made by them or intentionally reshared by them. Stop at that and you get rid of the influencer spam. The danger of placing yourself in a bubble is still there, but at least it's a bubble of your friends, that you could have got yourself into even in real life. Of course, there's the question of how you finance this.
- fineIllregister 8mo ago
  > Didn't the original facebook only show you posts of friends? The feed was added a few years later. Originally, if you wanted to see someone's posts, you had to go to their page and look on their wall (a term I haven't heard in some time).
camgunz 8mo ago
Bluesky has all the things that made Twitter a cesspool: a small character limit (300 is still too small) and virality stats (likes/retweets). Its only saving grace right now is that it's itty bitty; if it ever achieved scale it would have the same core problems. Which is to say, if you're betting on ATProto, try a Bluesky w/o those things. But, more to the point, this stuff is just Usenet where the users are the newsgroups. But that's not the basis for a community unless the user's famous. What you want is something like forums (Reddit) where people with common interests come together. Anything else is like, hyperindividualistic and isolating. It occurred to me that "Twitter is Usenet where individual users are the topics" is peak Millennial. Dunno what I'm gonna do with that one.

164 points by speckx 8mo ago

I bet on ATProto the last year, I've left this year. The network has been shrinking and the Bluesky leadership has been misleading about "user" numbers and hiding that they took private equity money. The atmo fund looks like a bunch of self dealing. I no longer trust any of them. This year, I'm betting less social media as being better and in the long-run a new protocol that learns from the mistakes.

chokolad 8mo ago
> This year, I'm betting less social media as being better and in the long-run a new protocol that learns from the mistakes. Can you list protocol level mistakes made by ATProto?
- verdverm 8mo ago
  Permissioned data is probably the most fundamental, the part I looked most deeply into myself. People want privacy over blasting everything out to the internet for anyone to scrape. The public by default forced upon users is a bad choice. The purported benefits never materialized. Many of the atmo developers have this belief they can skip the network effects, grift the data and social graph for their own use. Here's the User Intent proposal that is super easy to implement, yet they have been sitting on it since: https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/discussions/3617 https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/discussions/3617 This would have been at least a middle ground to permissioned data, as would have been personal private data (bsky prefs generalized). After that money, which I see as less of a protocol thing. A protocol or platform has to enable the people to make way more money than itself, at least 10x. (1) Bluesky should have created subscriptions for their service, they wouldn't have needed the private equity had they. (2) Bluesky did more to block others making money than enable it. Graze was in talks with them to enable the creators using their feed system to make money, until Bluesky walked away. (3) Permissioned data would unlock monetization without blockchain. Permissioned data is being worked on, but the commentary from Bluesky is not promising. (1) Nobody in ATProto has built a permission system (that I'm aware of) (2) Bluesky are proposing a very simplistic system. This will put burden on app developers and create opposition the credible exit philosophy. Record history / editing. The former should be at the protocol level, the later on feature that is highly desired, possible today, but they resist with fervor. Bluesky could have put way more funding into the ecosystem, especially in hindsight with the $100M they picked up just after peak. Now they are struggling and stepping on that ecosystem, re: replacing Graze instead of supporting and integrating them with their latest "ai" stunt. Compare this to Hytale and what they are doing. Night and day. The Bluesky team has also made several PR mistakes, upsetting their base, they are really tone deaf. Hope the waffles are tasty!
  - verdverm 8mo ago
    The PLC comes up a lot, and I understand the criticism, but it is also good enough for now and on the right trajectory, though the pace could be better, hut like much of the Bluesky development it has molasses in winter vibes. Long-term, multiple identity authorities can exist. Something like Handshake would have been ideal, another great project doomed by poor leadership. Supporting delete is a good decision in my opinion, and likely a legal requirement. I also like that ATProto stuck a balance between decentralized and user experience. Properly federated systems are unlikely to appeal to the masses, re: blockchain. Two other well designed parts of ATProto are how the algos and moderation work. Modular, composable, and anyone can participate. This would change with a properly permissioned protocol (zanzibar + macaroons imo) and encourage smaller social instead of big social.
  - pfraze 8mo ago
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    - verdverm 8mo ago
      [dead]
- kevinak 7mo ago
  Not parent but I wrote an article about how PDSs (the thing that hosts your data) control your signing and rotation keys. It's technically possible to self-host but as always, the default becomes the norm. 99.999% of users on ATProto host their data on BlueSky servers. https://kevinak.se/blog/who-actually-owns-your-atproto-identity-hint-its-probably-not-you https://kevinak.se/blog/who-actually-owns-your-atproto-ident...

sieabahlpark 8mo ago

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hresvelgr 8mo ago

Focusing on protocol and decentralisation is putting the cart before the horse. The reason why Twitter, and Reddit in particular work so well is because of sub-communities that form organically. More importantly, discovery was part of the value in using it. It's why every Mastodon community specific to one niche/subject is not very interesting, people are not one single interest, we follow someone we like for one reason, maybe it's they make cool art, then we find out they also make music too, then bam, you discover a new genre of music and the community around it. Decentralisation actively introduces friction into the most rewarding loop of the entire thing. Centralisation isn't the problem, it's just comorbid with shitty governance.

phoronixrly 8mo ago
> The reason why Twitter, and Reddit in particular work so well is because of sub-communities that form organically. Which sub-communities are on Twitter right now?
- throwaway85825 8mo ago
  It seems like most of Japan.
  - verdverm 8mo ago
    Japanese is the second most used language on Bluesky https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.dev/bsky_langs.html https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.d...
    - esbranson 8mo ago
      Is the same algorithmic connectivity with Japanese happening on Bluesky as it is on Twitter, or are Bluesky's algorithms just as opaque as Twitter's?
      - verdverm 8mo ago

esbranson 8mo ago

I was disappointed by the hard divergence from core aspects of Tim Berners-Lee‘s vision (and its current implementations) of a Web 3.0 but oh well. Threads got on board, and it’s not to say the missing parts can’t be bolted on later. In particular any future W3C Linked Web Storage WG protocols.[1] [1] https://www.w3.org/groups/wg/lws/ https://www.w3.org/groups/wg/lws/

CqtGLRGcukpy 8mo ago

I've realized not to bet on any social media. For example, pre-Elon Twitter, I thought Twitter was going to around a long time and I would continue to use it for many years. I left Twitter when Elon bought it. While I'm on various social media sites now, I can fairly easily pick up a new one as I see fit. And if my audience doesn't want to follow me there, they don't have to. And I can find different people to follow on that new one. You never know what is going to happen.

calvinmorrison 8mo ago
if you are always looking for new 'audiences' it's probably just media and not social media. I use hubs my peers and friends use. IRC, email and for the boomers - Facebook.

charcircuit 8mo ago

X just unified the feed across languages such that all posts automatically get translated for users. These kinds of innovations are much more important than the ability to be able to switch apps.

desireco42 8mo ago
Absolutely agree, but as technologists our instict is to solve problem as technical, not as social.
- verdverm 8mo ago
  Is it the "when all you have is a hammer..." issue?
_lvbh 8mo ago
Did it? Just checked and my feed is still completely untranslated. I have my settings set as English. I hope they don't do the weird YouTube thing of translating things from languages you know into the language you set. Multilingual people exist
- charcircuit 8mo ago
  The feature only rolled out to me today and I think it started rolling out to people only a couple days ago.
- numpad0 8mo ago
  It's only rolling out in past 1-2 days, and also English speaking users are already running low on sanity from being constantly exposed to Japanosphere norms. We'll see how long this experiment is going to last...
blactuary 8mo ago
It's a nazi website. Before I left they started allowing people to call me the n-word

busterarm 8mo ago

I am all-in on face to face relationships and no longer investing in the fiction of socializing with people through a screen (or only over the phone). And I've been here since low baud modem days and through every niche internet community and medium you can think of. Eventually I decided to prioritize my health over everything -- job, friends, extended family, hobbies -- transient relationships with things & people just don't matter any longer. If you want community you have to cultivate it and it isn't real if it isn't deeply intertwined with most of your life. Also, owning my own copies of things too, from books to music to video tutorials. It either goes ona shelf or in the NAS and gets indexed.

manifoldgeo 8mo ago

I'd be curious to see how ATProto stacks up against ActivityPub in the long run. I was very excited by the prospects of Mastodon, PeerTube, and a few other Fediverse apps. I even started implementing my own ActivityPub library based on their RFC before I fizzled out. But, the Fediverse never really seemed to take off in the mainstream. Mozilla launched their own mastodon instance around 2023 and then closed it in 2024. I've never heard anything about PeerTube in casual conversation, and Mastodon is not common to hear about either. As someone with a tech degree and a liberal arts degree, I think protocols like this are excellent examples of trying to solve social issues with technology instead of policy or other approaches. I can't tell you what those other approaches would be, but I haven't seen a lot of efficacy from the purely technological ones. Eventually, the pressure of turning a profit always seems to take over, pushing the moral mission aside. Still. I'm rooting for ATProto to speak truth to power and uproot apps like X and Instagram.

troosevelt 8mo ago
I think realistically the only people who care about this are a very niche number of hardcore users. I won't be surprised if federated networks never take off. Obviously there are good reasons for normies to care but when the solution is as disjointed as some of the federated stuff has been, it's just not an advantage. You end up with a bunch of idealists/nerds chatting about the same stuff. It's not terrible but the average person does not care. I mean arguably the average person doesn't really post on social media, either. Sometimes I wonder if future generations will consider this all hot air. Really, they're kind of unncessary to begin with, you probably do want an off-ramp but it's better if a centralized service just has good governance and policies that can be affected by users. The current setup is still usually relatively closed entities that are federated. Regarding the awareness of it in the mainstream, I somehow got too high at a local pot shop and ended up chatting with the cashier. He was a former gamedev and knew what quaternions were (we were both confused by them), but I felt deep shame when I mentioned IRC and he clearly had never heard of it. I don't think outside of HN and other niches, people have heard or care about these federated protocols. It's a very nerdy/self-indulgent need to worry about whether all of your Internet writings are accessible via various means.
pojntfx 8mo ago

tolerance 8mo ago

I think that a lot of people are going to get ATProto whether they want to or not. I don't want to believe that anyone involved with it at in a decision-making or policy-driving capacity is a big enough loser to only want better social media out of it. Decentralized web apps are a proof of concept.

verdverm 8mo ago
fyi, Bain Capital (private equity) now has a say in where things go. Technically since April of last year, but we are now just finding out because they withheld their $100M "funding"
- tolerance 8mo ago
  ahem, Bain Capital "Crypto", to be exact. Among others. https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-19-2026-series-b https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-19-2026-series-b Did not know that Bloomberg was into VC now.
  - verdverm 8mo ago
    Bain Capital subsidiaries are still Bain Capital. Crypto makes it even less appealing imo.

apitman 8mo ago

> Social media was supposed to connect us, but most of it has turned into ads, division, and loneliness. I'm betting on ATProto as a way to fix that I disagree with the premise here. I think the core mechanics of social media, ie instant communication between random strangers about random topics, creates toxic interactions regardless of whether it's manipulated by engagement algorithms. Some of the most toxic conversations I've seen were on Mastodon. If there's a healthy future for socializing on the internet, I think it will happen in small communities. That will slow down dissemination of information, but maybe that would be a good thing.

verdverm 8mo ago
I'm not convinced it is social media wholesale, rather it is about size. Platforms like microblogging are more about the person, the quips, the dunking. If you are in any small communities using social platforms like Discord/Signal (chat rooms) or Discourse (forum), it's a very different feel. Most are genuinely positive experiences. I suppose it depends on how one defines social media. My definitions are more flexible than they used to be.
- packetlost 8mo ago
  Once someone builds a reasonable Google+ clone on ATProto or ActivityPub I'd probably switch to that. I don't think we've solved reputation when it comes to decentralized identity providers yet either.
  - verdverm 8mo ago
    For real, trust online is an open and hard problem. It's only going to get harder with ai bots running amok.
    - packetlost 8mo ago
      I have some serious designs for a federated reputation system that is, as far as I can tell, novel but I haven't had time to really refine it and develop a proof of concept. Just a pile of notes for now

garethsprice 8mo ago

How does ATProto solve the problems that the last 10–20 years have shown seem intrinsic to all social media once it hits a certain scale? For example: A simple simulation of social networks rapidly reproduced three well-documented dysfunctions: partisan echo chambers, concentrated influence among a small elite, and amplification of polarized voices - creating a "social media prism" that distorts political discourse. Notably, all attempts at conscious intervention failed to help or made things worse. [1] Rather than fostering closer relationships, the algorithms and structures underlying social media platforms inadvertently contribute to profound psychological harm - particularly among teenagers, who are disproportionately affected by curated online personas, peer pressure to present a perfect digital image, and constant notification bombardment. [2] And from Meta's own internal UX research, surfaced in recent harm-related court filings: researchers described Instagram as functionally a drug, users as binging to the point of reward deficit, and the platform's role as that of a pusher. [3] I've gradually opted out of social media over the last few years. That Meta internal research was the thing that finally pushed me to delete IG, the last social app I was still using. My life has been noticeably calmer and better adjusted since - which makes me skeptical that a better protocol, rather than a fundamentally different relationship with technology and socialization, is our way out of the current mess. [1] https://arxiv.org/html/2508.03385v1 https://arxiv.org/html/2508.03385v1 [2] https://scholar.dsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1222&context=ccspapers https://scholar.dsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1222&con... [3] https://www.lieffcabraser.com/pdf/2025-11-21-Brief-dckt-2480_0.pdf https://www.lieffcabraser.com/pdf/2025-11-21-Brief-dckt-2480... (p. 33)

verdverm 8mo ago
The credible exit allows for real competition. In other words you can own your identity and data, apps store content in your database, and you can swap out apps that enshittify, eg. there are many alternative clients for bluesky data. The design of feeds (algos) and labellers (moderation) is unique and one of the best parts of the protocol. There are also interesting applications for inter-app features, a double edged sword, i.e. good for content creators but bad for something like linkedin.
- ninjagoo 8mo ago

gregjw 8mo ago

I think I just need to be less online, I've kind of lost hope.

rchaud 8mo ago

Isn't this just reinventing the wheel of a website, an email list and a message board? Are the scientists referenced in this article really so averse to having a website or corresponding via email that they need a social media instance to chat with every Tom, Dick and Harry that can't put up with the friction of clicking a mailto: link? How did that go during Covid, when everyone on Twitter suddenly became an infectious disease specialist? > So you could use another app like Blacksky and have the same exact posts, comments, and likes that you do on Bluesky. And if you ever decide that you don’t like what Bluesky is doing [...] you can move somewhere else, keeping your followers, connections, and content. How is that different from moving to a new web host or newsletter provider? And what happens if your Bluesky connections don't move over to the new thing? Or if Bluesky chooses to create a read-only archive of your posts and changes the UI to obscure the ATproto ID or whatever it is that certifies the content as being "yours"?

verdverm 8mo ago
https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers This article does a good job of explaining some nuanced differences. Tl;dr - ATProto (public data) can be viewed as a distributed event bus that anyone can plug-n-play into. It's a good design imo

ninjagoo 8mo ago

Not trustworthy. The providers mentioned in the article, blacksky and bluesky, presumably the most visible ones, do not allow signups with anonymous email providers even though they make you pass a human verification step. The link in the article for Blacksky (blackskyweb.xyz) has a dark pattern that attempts to get you sign up for bluesky instead of blacksky. Odd. The bigger issue is funding - currently appears to be VC funded (seed round 2023, Series A 2024), so they'll want a return at some point. Voilà, enshittification. The biggest selling point - portable identity - is a mirage because the current providers do not give you the cryptographic keys to your identity. So they can simply lock you down, and your 'identity' is done.

verdverm 8mo ago
> The biggest selling point - portable identity - is a mirage because the current providers do not give you the cryptographic keys to your identity. So they can simply lock you down, and your 'identity' is done. Here is one of many sites that help users de-risk, backup, and migrate: https://pdsmoover.com/ https://pdsmoover.com/
- ninjagoo 8mo ago
  > Here is one of many sites that help users de-risk, backup, and migrate Unfortunately, doesn't work if you're already locked out ... And, you have to give this 3rd party site your username and password. Ouch.
  - verdverm 8mo ago
    You can use `goat` for a CLI version: https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lj7jmt2ct72r https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lj7jmt2ct72r I'm not sure if OAuth gives access to the account management APIs. Certainly much could be improved. Nudging users would be a good notification within the Bluesky app, like one of those on boarding task lists that doesn't have to be completed to get started, but remains visible until you complete or discard them. goat has since moved to a dedicated repository: https://github.com/bluesky-social/goat https://github.com/bluesky-social/goat There is also an adversarial path (when the PDS will not play nice), but it requires setting up a rotation key and having a repo backup ahead of time. https://www.da.vidbuchanan.co.uk/blog/adversarial-pds-migration.html https://www.da.vidbuchanan.co.uk/blog/adversarial-pds-migrat...

CobrastanJorji 8mo ago

I haven't really tried doing anything with ATProto, but I do regularly see content from some folks who are into it, and the thing I like about ATProto is how generally cheerful and friendly and happy the ATProto community is. They're out there with all of the zeal of the old blockchain devs, except without the inky black evil of that movement. Mind you, being a happy community mostly means projects that are either doomed or else ridiculous (looking at you, Doom-on-ATProto guys), but it feels like giddy old school hacks, and that makes me smile.

skybrian 8mo ago
The people doing the building seem pretty positive, but on Bluesky there are some pretty vocal complainers who apparently hate everything.
verdverm 8mo ago
One of the reasons I stopped hanging out in the "atmosphere" (the name for the broader, community driven ecosystem) is that I was personally attacked three times. The last straw was one of the leadership team jumping down my throat because I used the phrase "marketplace of ideas" that apparently triggered this individual. It's not all pleasant. For me, I have a 3rd time's the charm rule I typically follow. Others may have more or less tolerance for this sort of thing.

gmerc 8mo ago

We are still betting on technology to fix society scale problems I see.

jauntywundrkind 8mo ago
To me this looks like betting on using open interoperation to allow people to keep finding systems, moderation, algorithms, tools, and apps that work, that give them control and personal sovereignty over their personal data servers. I don't think we've had many times where we actually give people a chance. Sure Twitter didn't used to cost $40k a year for API access, but it still had gobs of restrictions on what you could look at and do. It still was Twitter's moderation & feeds. The whole experience here is up for remake, perpetually. It is the anti-stagnant, the anti-rot that besets all these controlled systems.

gnarlouse 8mo ago

> I don’t think any social media platform was designed to do this. But it’s where most of them have ended up. They were, quite literally, designed to do this. They needed to monetize the user base to pay for the server costs. Zuck wanted a business.

bjt 8mo ago

I like the future that the ATProto evangelists are painting. I would love for it to happen. But I am skeptical that a protocol is going to solve an incentive problem. In the beginning Twitter was very free and open with API access. There were plenty of alternative apps. Of course, that changed when they got serious about monetizing. Would it really be any harder for Bluesky to switch from ATProto to a proprietary API than it was for Twitter to close their API? How many users are realistically going to download their archives and upload them to some other provider? If most people are using the website or official app, that's where the stickiness is. There would be a blog post with a title like "Supporting the Bluesky Community for the Next Century" and how it's better to have a centralized site that can feed its employees than an idealistic decentralized one that disappears. Things would seem OK at first. But enough years of chasing quarterly KPIs would put them in the same spot as Twitter and Facebook.

skybrian 8mo ago
The Bluesky API's are much more open than the Twitter API's ever were. There are people building alternate implementations of the entire stack. The alternatives don't have many users (maybe a few hundred to a few thousand), but the infrastructure is pretty far along.
jimbokun 8mo ago
About the same number as would fork an open source project. So not very many. But the possibility of doing so is invaluable.
- verdverm 8mo ago
  The phrase "hard fork" has come up before in the ecosystem, and outside of it with others who've stepped back and watch to see how things unfold.

davidw 8mo ago

> It was incredible to see all of these people with very different backgrounds and interests coming together for one common goal: making the world better with technology. I feel that's been kind of absent for a while. Sure, tech is huge and there are niches, but the general zeitgeist. Like... the tech world went from this kind of niche thing, to "hey, hackers, you could set yourself up by creating a company and then get to do what you want", which then shifted more and more towards companies, and is right now lurching towards a world where you must pay a mega AI corporation if you want your output to be competitive.

andrewstuart 8mo ago

I found it easier just to drop social networks entirely. I don’t need it so much to seek an alternative.

zhivota 8mo ago

The only social stuff I interact with anymore is a private forum that's paid, which is by far the best discussion on the internet for me, and other than that some discord servers for games I play. Global social networks are cancer no matter the protocol, that's my opinion after many years trying to carve out a use for them in my life. No matter how hard I try to curate my feeds, inevitably they make me more angry, sad, and combative in my online life.

jordwest 8mo ago
I tend to agree, I’ve been thinking a lot over the years that this is the way we get out of this mess - lots and lots of smaller independently owned forums that splinter off onto small communities instead of monolithic single-identity mechanisms like social media & to some extent the fediverse. > The only social stuff I interact with anymore is a private forum that's paid Im curious when you say private, do you mean you can only post if you’re a member, or is all post content viewable only by members too? And if the latter, how did you discover the forum, and how did you decide to join?
- zhivota 8mo ago
  Nothing is accessible to non members. It's only $5/mo and the fee is explicitly to filter out people who don't care enough about the subject matter to pay a nominal fee. I found it because someone I followed in my Twitter days hated how nasty conversations inevitably got there, and wanted a place to have in depth, non-ephemeral conversation with like minded people. These days you'd probably discover it via X where they still post, or their Substack.

cmxch 8mo ago

What does ATProto have that isn’t simply a hermetic barrier against heterodoxy? You have a protocol that makes it easy to concentrate the self-same toxicity it is trying to prevent.

wolvoleo 8mo ago

Will it ever be fully decentralised though? I don't consider it that with a company holding key parts. And a little bit better but still not quite there doesn't do it for me.

nirui 8mo ago

Maybe it's because I watched The Expanse too many times, I'm kinda attracted by their concept of COMM system. Based on how it was depicted, it's a site-to-site (thus P2P) based system that allows encryption, hop-via-proxy and multi-stream transport (embedding files in video call). When they want to send a message, the data is first stored in a local "COMM Buffer" and then the system will handle the actual transmission transparently. The data transceiving can be done in real-time if the participants are near. If not, then it will work similar to how email is exchanged (except the data stream is multimedia, not just text). How is this relates to AT Protocol (and maybe ActivePub)? Well, AT Protocol is designed to be used in "social network" settings, but "social network" was largely evolved from people forwarding emails etc. I think if you could build a really good COMM protocol that allows people exchange information quickly and efficiently, then it should be fairly easy to add social elements on top of it. I think the idea of building a "social network protocol" itself is wrong. People get on social media to do things, maybe it's gather info, maybe it's to learn, maybe it's to make contact etc. Maybe smart people should focus on building a protocol to enable all that, rather than just trying to build something that poorly mimics what the big platform has already perfected. Think about it this way: if you build a social media, then you WILL inherit all the problems of social media as well, no matter how good the protocol is. So maybe just build something else instead then.

pjc50 8mo ago
> the data is first stored in a local "COMM Buffer" and then the system will handle the actual transmission transparently. People younger than me may want to read up on UUCP/NNTP/Fidonet systems, which did this. Ideal if you don't have FTL communications, or are just limited to a really slow phone line. > People get on social media to do things, maybe it's gather info, maybe it's to learn, maybe it's to make contact etc. Yes, exactly. There's this odd cognitive dissonance because people who make social networks are really into the process of "making a social network", but for everyone else it's a means to an end, and usually as part of a "community", however that ends up being defined. > Think about it this way: if you build a social media, then you WILL inherit all the problems of social media as well Yes - and those are not new. A certain segment of people are optimistic/privileged enough to not believe the problems are real until it's too late.

rambambram 8mo ago

I'm betting on domain names, HTML and email.

bullen 8mo ago
Yes, but we need to decentralize DNS first! And that means making closed port 53 illegal on your home fiber... good luck! Also need to open port 25 outgoing on that same fiber. And we all need routers that run dd-wrt, the problem is all routers that support dd-wrt are sold out because support always comes late in the production cycle. It's hard work to self host, but it's the only work worth doing.

snowpid 8mo ago

Can anyone recommend me aggregators or nice communities from ATProto or ActivityPub? I'd like to become social online.

nottorp 8mo ago

I don't think protocols are the solution. Didn't the original facebook only show you posts of friends? Made by them or intentionally reshared by them. Stop at that and you get rid of the influencer spam. The danger of placing yourself in a bubble is still there, but at least it's a bubble of your friends, that you could have got yourself into even in real life. Of course, there's the question of how you finance this.

fineIllregister 8mo ago
> Didn't the original facebook only show you posts of friends? The feed was added a few years later. Originally, if you wanted to see someone's posts, you had to go to their page and look on their wall (a term I haven't heard in some time).

camgunz 8mo ago

Bluesky has all the things that made Twitter a cesspool: a small character limit (300 is still too small) and virality stats (likes/retweets). Its only saving grace right now is that it's itty bitty; if it ever achieved scale it would have the same core problems. Which is to say, if you're betting on ATProto, try a Bluesky w/o those things. But, more to the point, this stuff is just Usenet where the users are the newsgroups. But that's not the basis for a community unless the user's famous. What you want is something like forums (Reddit) where people with common interests come together. Anything else is like, hyperindividualistic and isolating. It occurred to me that "Twitter is Usenet where individual users are the topics" is peak Millennial. Dunno what I'm gonna do with that one.