Comment by aftbit
8 hours ago
I can't decide if ATProto is actually amazing or if its proponents are just dazzled by their own tech. Is it truly decentralized? What makes it better than Mastodon or Matrix or Scuttlebutt? Of course, at the end of the day, it's the network effects that matter. Attention is all you need indeed.
The team came from the IPFS and Scuttlebutt worlds. "Better" is relative to your design goals. Iroh is better for point-to-point connections & localfirst. Matrix is better for chat rooms. Etc. The general logic of atproto was to serve large scale publishing with an open model that doesn't seriously degrade the UX. The scale orientation means - at least until the non-public spaces land - you're syncing a lot of records to provide an alternative microblogger to bluesky. The account hosting system, however - the pds - remains exceedingly cheap and easy to run. Pros and cons, matching with the design goals.
I will say that I have no relation to bluesky so it's not my tech and I do find it amazing. This post from Dan Abramov might help in clarifying how 'decentralized' it is compared to the threadiverse https://overreacted.io/there-are-no-instances-in-atproto/
> What makes it better than Mastodon or Matrix or Scuttlebutt?
Decentralized identity. You don’t have to choose a specific instance and be locked into your decision.
The Twitter-competitive social site is moribund, so I think maybe what you're seeing more and more of is the pivot towards infrastructure --- always planned, but not before such a big part of the messaging.
Feels like a solution in search of a problem - just like all the others. Also feels like only half a solution - just like anything else developers invent. Do you remember what Joel Spolsky said about P2P architectures and Napster? It doesn't matter whether your system is P2P or not, it matters whether or not the user can type in the name of a song and then listen to it. That's how YouTube is the new Napster. Because you can just type in a song and listen to it, and for the sake of determining popularity, it's completely irrelevant whether this is done by stealing the music or by legally licensing it. However, the ads that pay for that licensing are relevant.
ATProto is attempting the "if we make it P2P it'll be popular!" strategy except not with P2P.