So, if you're online poisoned like me, you may have noticed that Bluesky CEO Jay Graber has been having sort of a slow motion, low-key public meltdown for the past several weeks. Most recently, in this interaction with a user.

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Even with practical technical decentralization, the vast majority of Bluesky users are on, well, Bluesky. Bluesky was never really packaged as something that was relatively easy for someone to spin up on their own servers; the network has been historically extremely centralized, and only small minorities of users have broken off.

AT Proto decentralization doesn't exist as a practical reality, and if it ever does it won't be for years. Most of the work driving effective decentralization is being done by third parties, who have limited guarantees about future compatibility with possible breaking changes on Bluesky's end.

Bluesky inc isn't really making 'a protocol', they're making Bluesky, the monolithic (to within a rounding error) social network that they operate.

I do genuinely believe that the Bluesky team set off from the start to create a decentralized protocol, but unfortunately for them they ended up running a social network. And at this point, AT Proto has become essentially a sort of ideological vaporware; a way for Jay Graber et al to run a social media platform while claiming they don't run a social media platform.

This is, of course, just another iteration of the Silicon Valley monoproduct: power without accountability. The tech industry elite are very much like Gilded Age railroad barons – buying up whole towns, breaking up strikes, imposing top-down economic policy on whole sectors – except all the while they claim that they are just technology enthusiasts playing with their little trains.

Toot

Toot

Ruby Central recently took over a collection of open source projects from their maintainers without their consent.

Meta has used back-to-school pictures of schoolgirls to advertise one of its social media platforms to a 37-year-old man, in a move parents described as “outrageous” and “upsetting”.

The man noticed that posts encouraging him to “get Threads”, Mark Zuckerberg’s rival to Elon Musk’s [Twitter], were being dropped into his Instagram feed featuring embedded posts of uniformed girls as young as 13 with their faces visible and, in most cases, their names.

The children’s images were used by Meta after their parents had posted them on Instagram to mark their return to school. The parents were unaware that Meta’s settings permitted it to do this. One mother said her account was set to private, but the posts were automatically cross-posting to Threads where they were visible. Another said she posted the picture to a public Instagram account. The posts of their children were highlighted to the stranger as “suggested threads”.

The recipient told the Guardian the posts felt “deliberately provocative and ultimately exploitative of the children and families involved”.

Over the past few months in particular, the Social Web Community Group has seen an increase in heated discussions online that have been arguing protocol superiority and creating conflict between ActivityPub and AT Protocol, or trying to promote one over the other. These discussions have generally not been productive, created contention within the community that stands in the way of collaboration, and been a hotbed for conflict, disagreements, and misinformation. There has often been significant biases exhibited within these conversations.

ActivtyPub in its current usage does make different design decisions to AT Protocol, but ActivityPub is not necessarily that different from AT Protocol: both are open social web protocols.

There is an entire section of the ActivityPub specification that isn't as well known or widely adopted but which, at a high level, provides fairly similar ideas to those emphasized within the AT Protocol community for separation between data, identity and applications. Recently, a taskforce within the Social Web Community Group has been established to advance what is now known as the ActivityPub API.

Whilst we may have our differences at present, over time those gaps will narrow, as we share a lot more in common than we have differences.

There does not have to be a “winning” protocol. We do not build a better open social web for everyone by fighting and arguing about protocol superiority. That is not how we achieve a better open social web. Instead, we must work together, cross-pollinate and share ideas, and participate within each other's communities with respect and mutual understanding. Arguing between us only emboldens those that seek to derail and destroy efforts to build an open social web.

The practice of collaboration outside of our own groups has a long history within the standards community, whether that is with competing companies working together on standards or protocols, or collaboration between different standards bodies like the W3C and IETF.

There has already been cross-pollination of ideas between the people working on ActivityPub and AT Protocol. For example, AT Protocol adopted an internet draft that was originally written to support the ActivityPub ecosystem, and projects within ActivityPub have adopted some ideas on content labeling and starter packs from the AT Protocol ecosystem.

Both ActivityPub and AT Protocol can and do co-exist. This co-existence is perhaps best emphasized by the outstanding work of Bridgy Fed project, which connects ActivityPub, AT Protocol, and other protocols together allowing for interoperability and community that crosses between protocols. If you wanted to summarise this letter on a t-shirt, it would be “People > Protocols > Platforms”.

This statement is a call for cooling the temperature of discussions and a reminder to be respectful of each other and the huge amount of work everyone is putting in to build a better open social web. We do not win by tearing each other down, which only emboldens and empowers those who do not want either protocol to succeed.

This statement was written following an initial discussion at this month's Social Web Community Group meeting, and has been reviewed by several members of the CG.

Mark Zuckerberg, a bankruptcy lawyer from Indiana, has filed a lawsuit against Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta.

Bluesky