I've followed the ATProto space (and seen you around the space) a bunch over time, and honestly for the private data portion of it, I'm quite bearish on the idea of an ATProto shaped thing winning here.

I do think "small social" is winning in almost every definition of the word. There's Discords for everything, each non-technical person I know is in 10s of group chats, folks on Instagram or Twitter seek their "communities" on these apps. HN and Reddit are somewhat platforms of yesterday, valuable only for the sheer volume of conversation, not really of any particular use, often used to doomscroll on the toilet or in the supermarket line.

But ultimately I don't see why you need a protocol for small social. ActivityPub could do it fine (even though it's largely used as a glorified JSON HTTP API), Matrix or IRCv3 can do it fine, email works and is being used, heck you could even roll a bespoke HTTP or Websocket RPC (de-facto ActivityPub) to fix the problem anyway. ATProto is useful because it's a protocol for socializing In the Large. I think user experience matters for this much more than a protocol. I know Bluesky users want it, but I'm not convinced that an ATProto derived solution is the answer.

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verdverm an hour ago | parent [-]

strong agreement here

> Ultimately I don't see why you need a protocol for small social.

For me, it is less about the technical reasons and more about the movement away from corporate control to community ownership. The desire among people is there because the growing shared belief that what we have today is not healthy for our self or society.

One thing Bluesky nailed was simplicity for the average user. UX is super important. That was despite the protocol which almost all users, and non-users who've heard of Bluesky, have no idea about. However, it was the protocol movement that formed the foundation for their success.

That being said, you can only realize the vision (of the people taking back social media from the capitalists and enabling real competition in social media) with a well designed protocol. ATProto gave us a lot towards this. So I'm now contradicting(?) my first sentence in this comment.

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Karrot_Kream an hour ago | parent [-]

Agree that you need a well designed protocol, but I think for small social, we're drowning in good protocols. A lot of the issues with ActivityPub, for example, come about because of socializing In the Large. Once you're just hanging out in a community it doesn't matter if someone trips and bans you or deletes all your messages; this is par-for-the-course for small social drama. What makes AP so fraught for large scale social is that small social drama affects the network as a whole. AP is just one example. IRC, XMPP, Matrix, mailing lists, they've all been working for years even decades.

I think you need someone to build out a good UX more than anything else. They who builds the UX will win the spoils IMO. There's plenty of protocol prior art to bolt on underneath the fact.

	▲	verdverm an hour ago \| parent [-]
		If I do decide to work on a social protocol, I will be keen to not build on existing ones to avoid the prior drama and bikeshedding. (re: the AP vs AT debate pattern that has grown this year) Will definitely "distill" several ideas from them tho! I maintain a space on my chalkboard for it.