I looked at Bluesky's AT Protocol from a developer perspective, making some comparisons to ActivityPub.

[ricmac@mastodon.social]

I looked at Bluesky's AT Protocol from a developer perspective, making some comparisons to ActivityPub. Hat-tip @danabra.mov, @laurenshof & @pluralistic for work that I referenced. In summary: I think ATProto has a compelling identity and content architecture for developers — tbh it's much better than the fediverse from a personal ID and content ownership pov — *but* decentralization remains a major concern. https://thenewstack.io/blueskys-at-protocol-pros-and-cons-for-developers/

[edsu@social.coop]

@ricmac did you look into how deletes work at the protocol/model level at all? It's my understanding that posts are stored in a merkletree and are difficult to completely delete, as was the case in the main developers previous social media experiment (Scuttlebutt).

[ricmac@mastodon.social]

@edsu Oh that's interesting, I will look further into that. I forgot to mention the Scuttlebutt connection; I wrote about that a while ago, along with Paul Frazee's Beaker Browser (which derived from that, if I remember correctly).

[justinh@twit.social]

@ricmac @danabra.mov @laurenshof @pluralistic An interesting protocol doesn't negate the fact that they're going to have to pay back the investors one day. Decentralization should be *the* concern.

[ricmac@mastodon.social]

@JustinH @danabra.mov @laurenshof @pluralistic I agree, but only time will tell if they can actually make it more decentralized (as they say they want to).

[smallcircles@social.coop]

@ricmac @edsu

No, didn't derive. But based on similar principles. Beaker was based on DAT/Hypercore.

[justinh@twit.social]

@ricmac @danabra.mov @laurenshof @pluralistic If it becomes truly decentralized it would be impossible to monetize to the degree required. The company that develops Mastodon has like 8 employees.

[ricmac@mastodon.social]

@JustinH @danabra.mov @laurenshof @pluralistic Maybe. The original plan for the Bluesky project was for Twitter itself to move to the open protocol, and presumably continue to be a good business. But of course now Bluesky Inc is the company trying to eventually do that. We shall see, but I don’t think it’s impossible.

[edsu@social.coop]

@smallcircles @ricmac yeah, all three (bluesky, beaker/hypercore, scuttlebutt) use merkle tree, append only logs?