Protocol Churn

Bluesky and the Fediverse are our best online hopes for humane human conversation. Things happened on 2025/01/13; I’ll hand the microphone to Anil Dash, whose post starts “This is a monumental day for the future of the social web.”

What happened? Follow Anil’s links: Mastodon and Bluesky (under the “Free Our Feeds” banner). Not in his sound-bite: Both groups are seeking donations, raising funds to meet those goals.

I’m sympathetic to both these efforts, but not equally. I’m also cynical, mostly about the numbers: They’ve each announced a fundraising target, and both the targets are substantial, and I’m not going to share either, because they’re just numbers pulled out of the air, written on whiteboards, designed to sound impressive.

What is true · These initiatives, just by existing, are evidence in letters of fire 500 miles high, evidence of people noticing something important: Corporately-owned town squares are irreversibly discredited. They haven’t worked in the past, they don’t work now, and they’ll never work.

Something decentralized is the only way forward. Something not owned by anyone, defined by freely-available protocols. Something like email. Or like the Fediverse, which runs on the ActivityPub protocol. Or, maybe Bluesky, where by “Bluesky” I mean independent service providers federated via the AT Protocol, “ATProto” for short.

What is hard? · I’ll tell you what’s hard: Raising money for a good cause, when that good cause is full of abstractions about openness and the town square and so on. Which implies you’re not intending that the people providing the money will make money. So let’s wish both these efforts good luck. They’ll need it.

What matters · Previously in Why Not Bluesky I argued that, when thinking about the future of conversational media, what matters isn’t the technology, or even so much the culture, but the money: Who pays for the service? On that basis, I’m happy about both these initiatives.

But now I’m going to change course and talk about technology a bit. At the moment, the ATProto implementation that drives Bluesky is the only one in the world. If the company operating it failed in execution or ran out of money, the service would shut down.

So, in practice, Bluesky’s not really decentralized at all. Thus, I’m glad that the “Free Our Feeds” effort is going to focus on funding an alternative ATProto implementation. In particular, they’re talking about offering an alternative ATProto “Relay”.

Before I go on, you’re going to need a basic understanding of what ATProto is and how its parts work. Fortunately, as usual, Wikipedia has a terse, accurate introduction. If you haven’t looked into ATProto yet, please hop over there and remedy that. I’ll wait.

Now that you know the basics, you can understand why Free Our Feeds is focusing on the Relay. Because, assuming that Bluesky keeps growing, this is going to be a big, challenging piece of software to build, maintain, and operate, and the performance of the whole service depends on it.

The Fediverse in general and Mastodon in particular generally don’t rely on a global firehose feed that knows everything that happens, like an eye in the sky. In fact, the ActivityPub protocol assumes a large number of full-stack peer implementations that chatter with each other, in stark contrast to ATProto’s menagerie of Repos and PDSes and Relays and App Views and Lexicons.

The ATProto approach has advantages; since the Relay knows everything, you can be confident of seeing everything relevant. The Fediverse makes no such promise, and it’s well-known that in certain circumstances you can miss replies to your posts. And perhaps more important, miss replies to others’ posts, which opens the door to invisible attackers.

And this makes me nervous. Because why would anyone make the large engineering and financial investments that’d be required to build and operate an ATProto Relay?

ActivityPub servers may have their flaws, but in practice they are pretty cheap to operate. And it’s easy to think of lots of reasons why lots of organizations might want to run them:

1. A university, to provide a conversational platform for its students…

2. … or its faculty.

3. A Developer Relations team, to talk to geeks.

4. Organized religion, for evangelism, scholarship, and ministry.

5. Marketing and PR teams, to get the message out.

6. Government departments that provide services to the public.

Or consider my own instance, CoSocial, the creation of Canadians who (a) are fans of the co-operative movement, (b) concerned about Canadians’ data staying in Canada, and (c) want to explore modes of funding conversational media that aren’t advertising or Patreon.

Maybe, having built and run a Relay, the Free Our Feeds people will discover a rationale for why anyone else should do this.

So, anyhow… · I hope both efforts hit their fundraising targets. I hope both succeed at what they say they’re going to try.

But for my own conversation with the world, I’m sticking with the Fediverse.

Most of all, I’m happy that so many people, whatever they think of capitalism, have realized that it’s an unsuitable foundation for online human conversation. And most of all I hope that that number keeps growing.

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