Bluesky is designed the way it is because of scale. How do you make a p2p app that can handle hundreds of millions of posts per day without beefy servers helping? Bsky is designed so that the microservices themselves can be decentralized and so multiple different types of apps can be built on the same protocol/infra.

Obviously, it’s early days, and hopefully there is even more experimentation in the p2p space. But atproto architecture is a very fair experiment in this space. I can store my data on my own server, use a client app I wrote, subscribe to a specific aggregation/feed service I prefer, use the moderation list I want… all while still being connected to the larger protocol & network. It’s pretty neat.

I don't disagree, but I'm baffled that, with P2P as your preferred outcome, your orientation toward federated infrastructure is one of opposition rather than support. It feels philosophically confused to me; they're your natural allies, they're a step in your preferred direction and they have an instance of real world success (well, to a degree) which is important. Whatever theory of change motivates this form of criticism of federated services can't be one that's, say, intentional or strategic about outcomes. It feels more first principles.

One might also ask why P2P thesis statements only ever show up deep in the weeds in comment sections in response to the fediverse when logically speaking they would make just as much sense if not more in response to, say, any post about Facebook as a company or social media writ large, or business news about acquisitions, consolidation of web infrastructure into fewer hands, enshittification, or escalations of control over platforms.

Again, I'm fully on board with the dream of P2P but it feels like Buzz Aldrin criticizing Neil Armstrong for not doing enough to bring humanity into the space age.

We don't need large scale social networks in the first place. The Discord model of small communities is the way forward. Keep groups small enough for natural human social rules to apply. Slows down global dissemination of information for sure, but that's what the news is for, and anything important will eventually travel between communities anyway.

So I agree with you that they should work like email -- but I've always said that Mastodon is better because it is like email; aka the power is in the nodes.

What do you think is wrong about Mastodon? Genuinely curious because I also am super skeptical that ATProto brings anything that we really need.

Email is the prime example of federated communication. From protocol inception to painful expansion and aging protocol all until corporate apropriaton. But I still think federation is the way forward, absolute centralisation is bad I'll let you figure why, but absolute decentralization is also bad, limitations due to its nature, unusual working for most users... Meanwhile federation is right in the middle, and users already use it with email without even noticing!

Unfortunately, the swarm is 99.99999% advertisements for penis enlargement pills. How can a P2P system filter them out? A federated system relies on each admin to filter them out. A centralised system does even better, relying on a single dictator to filter them out. A P2P system requires every user to filter every spam message, together consuming far more effort than the spammer needed to send it.