@mmasnick always brings coherence to our social media dramas. Maybe now more will better understand why some of us remain excited for the potential of “protocols over platforms.”
“Bluesky Is Building The Decentralized Social Media Jack Dorsey Wants, Even If He Doesn’t Realize It.”
This is a long article, but read it to understand why some of us are just so tired of the misplaced comparisons to Twitter, Threads, And ActivityPub. All of these protocols can and should coexist right now as we better understand the needs. Some will merge and others will fade away. BlueSky has features that ActivityPub can adopt and benefit from. Competition is good.
@shoq i always think competition would be less hostile if companies understood choice is a good thing and that competition does not mean needing to beat the other guy
@shoq I've never been as enamored with Masnick as most of the rest of the world is. Quite frankly I think hes overly obsessed with Bluesky and AT, precisely because he sat in on those early meetings and drank the cool aid. AT has some great ideas around timeline management but it doesn't feel right. It just doesn't feel like a builders protocol to me. Time will tell.
@mike That feels like a tribal complaint. Their custom feeds are being made by developers at a breathless pace. I don’t see how you can be a better “builders” protocol than creating such an unprecedented model for an algo super-store. I try not to play favorites at this early stage. I like both models (activityPub) and ATProto. I think it’s way too early to decide on winners and losers.
@shoq "competition is good" is one of those things that often gets repeated in our capitalist society but isn't some kind of an absolute that holds no matter the circumstances. Competition is good in some contexts but cooperation is better in some others.
@vetehinen C’mon. Do you really think I was speaking in Boesky-esque absolutes, or in need a lecture on the uneven nature of competition? I was making a generalization about a well known benefit of competition; it typically yields a variety of solutions and approaches to many problems.
@vetehinen I don’t see why. In fact, this one context where I think it’s essential to break what can seem to be a glacial pace of development. Real competition (not the gamed nonsense that the Chamber of Commerce yammers about) would help transform social networking very quickly. To illustrate, watch what happens when Groups finally get added to Bluesky, Threads or Mastodon. All will scramble to catch up. Competition works.
@shoq Funny, I can easily come up with a few arguments and probably more if I gave it a little thought:
standards only happen when people agree to work together to make them instead of creating 20 competing ones (like in that XKCD strip)
splitting up a userbase in something where the network effect deeply matters might just hand your centralized and closed off competition the win so you probably should consider long and hard whether the benefits from doing it are worth it
limited resources are better spent working on something together rather than reinventing it many times
You don't have to agree but I find it very surprising that you're saying you can't even see it.
@vetehinen There are cases of standards helping and and harming innovation, so context counts. ActivityPub, a fine product, is not a standard because it was judged the best, but because it was there first, and long before future markets understood the need for a protocol at all. Now that such is better understood, what becomes a standard may benefit from more experience and review. And competition can drive innovation with or without standards. IoS vs Android is a case in point.
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