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ActivityPub/Nostr/At-Bluesky Compared

by nameequalsmain on 4/7/24, 5:44 PM with 75 comments

  • by pogue on 4/7/24, 7:07 PM

    This is from January 30th. Since then Bluesky has opened up to everyone (no invitation required), allows you to host your own PDS and even added new community based moderation tools known as Ozone internally, but acts a a "labeling service". It allows those who subscribe to them to get more specific tailored content they don't (or in some cases do!) want to see and it is labeled with a tag on accounts or posts, then the end user can choose whether they want those posts to have a warning on them, be completely hidden or nothing at all. It allows much more customized options & Bluesky doesn't need to actively close or ban accounts that might just include content other people don't want to see.

    From the stats of people who ran their own PDS for their own accounts, it used an less than 1mb of data transfer a day and insignificant amounts of CPU/RAM (less than a 20% spike). But, it will depend on how big your account is, how many followers you have, number of posts you make, etc etc.

    In native Bluesky with a default account, they have decentralized the servers so there are maybe around 20-30 servers all on the East Coast of the US. There's currently not much incentive to run your own. The PDS software is fairly new and unless you just wanted to have a non-US host for privacy reasons, you could do so and get away with running it on a RPi or standard VPS no problem. No one has yet started any major instances to rival the primary ones yet, however.

  • by edent on 4/7/24, 6:34 PM

    > it sends a copy per follower, meaning if 10 users on one server follow the same user on a remote server that remote server sends 10 copies of the message

    That's not right. Most AP servers operate a shared inbox. So you only need to send one message - no matter how many followers you have on that server.

  • by systemz on 4/7/24, 6:20 PM

    ActivityPub isn't perfect but still seems better vs putting everything in one basket controlled by big corp (Meta's FB, IG etc).

  • by qdot76367 on 4/7/24, 6:30 PM

    This post was written in late January. Bluesky opened up early access to federation about a month later, which does change some of the perspective. https://docs.bsky.app/blog/self-host-federation

  • by echelon on 4/7/24, 6:07 PM

    ActivityPub is ahead, but it feels like a dead end. It has the same issue with Reddit's little fiefdoms: moderators still lord over everyone and control speech, the algorithm, your feed, and your freedom.

    Nostr and Bluesky's AT protocol are the most promising. I love the truly distributed nature of Nostr, but the ecosystem is hard to get into. Bluesky has strong technical underpinnings and accessibility, but they're the only ones developing and implementing AT protocol.

    Social media should be more P2P and learn from the 2000's era before the platform giants stole away the dream. Bittorrent, RSS, Atom, semantic web (FOAF, microformats) were the way to complete digital freedom.

  • by robert_foss on 4/7/24, 9:53 PM

    What about Matrix? I think the protocol would compete well against the others in this list.

  • by linuxdude314 on 4/7/24, 7:26 PM

    The description of AT protocol is just super lacking.

    I highly recommend reading the actual protocol docs if you’re interested in learning about it and it’s scalability.

  • by mg on 4/7/24, 6:18 PM

    The next hurdle to create distributed social media seems to be distributed likes and follows. Those are the social currencies of today's generation.

    In a centralized system, you trust the central authority to show the correct number of likes a post got and the correct info who liked a post. Same for number of followers and who follows whom.

    Do any of these 3 protocols have an approach to do the same in a decentralized world?

  • by idle_zealot on 4/7/24, 7:52 PM

    These all feel quite over-engineered. I feel like a combination of a webpage with your bio and a feed of posts with an associated RSS feed could cover the "follow a user/microblogging" side of social media, and email could cover direct messaging and threaded conversations. What am I missing that these protocols bring to the table?

  • by fsiefken on 4/8/24, 2:13 PM

    It'd to add to the comparison:

    ## manyverse/sbb https://www.manyver.se/ (SBB)

    ## farcaster https://www.farcaster.xyz/ (Ethereum)

    ## a social app based on peers (formerly known as hypercore) https://twitter.com/Pears_p2p https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39373960

  • by jrm4 on 4/8/24, 12:48 AM

    If I understand this right: A supposed benefit of Nostr and Bluesky is the idea of having a strong cross-server identity.

    Nope. This is most likely a bad idea. And we've already essentially proven this because the overwhelmingly most important method of internet communication DOESN'T centralize like this and has no need to. Email works fine, probably better, WITHOUT this strong centralization.

    So while I agree with all the current short term clique-related critcisms of ActivityPub/Mastodon, it's still the smartest model.