Comment by danpalmer
4 days ago
I'm not going to do the protocol justice in an HN comment, but a core goal is to separate the entities that control the data, the entities that run the network, and the entities that control the interfaces (and recommendation algos etc).
If your Mastodon admin goes rogue, you a) have to get your data out of their hands, and b) have to rebuild your Mastodon presence in a new location, all your connections, history, etc are gone. That's exactly the same problem that Twitter users faced.
On ATProto, you can self-host your data while still making use of Bluesky/etc, in a way that you can't do with Mastodon or even email. You can choose who your UI comes from and just switch UI and keep everything, you can switch who your moderators are and keep everything else, etc.
Check out Blacksky, they're doing amazing work running a whole separate ATProto system that is fully compatible with, and actually the same social network as Bluesky. You can transparently migrate, at a protocol level, something Mastodon/ActivityPub doesn't attempt to tackle.
My understanding of ATProto is that it essentially means an open database. As a consequence anybody can write an alternative interfaces for any data.
The argument is that with ActivityPub does not care about that aspect. With Mastodon, the database is under the control of whoever owns the server.
The rebuilding part is rather similar, but exporting the data is trivial with ATProto but depends on the admin with ActivityPub.
But if you are going to self-host, then you can also self-host a Mastodon server and never have to migrate anywhere; wouldn't that achieve the same effect?
No it wouldn't, because each Mastodon server can choose who to federate with and many servers don't federate openly or don't federate with smaller hosts for technical, scaling, or even political reasons.
I've done it, self hosted Mastodon limited my ability to participate in the social network in a way that it does not on ATProto.
Also you can't port between instances. Whereas this is fundamental to the ATProto ecosystem.
Yes.