> And I have yet to actually see a real use of ATproto that isn't just immediately blown out of the water by ActivityPub.

ActivityPub doesn’t remotely even try to solve problems solved by atproto. What are you talking about?

In short, atproto makes apps interoperable by default by decoupling data hosting from applications. This means that apps become projections of everyone’s data, and can embed and interpret typed data from each other. ActivityPub doesn’t offer anything close, which is why you don’t have projects like http://leaflet.pub, https://standard.site, https://tangled.org, https://semble.so in the AP ecosystem.

If you genuinely want to learn about atproto, I have two longreads for you:

- https://overreacted.io/open-social/

- https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/

This isn’t Mastodon so a “Bluesky server” isn’t a thing.

Mastodon is shaped like email so you have “servers” sending messages to each other.

Atproto is shaped more like RSS with aggregation. Everyone posts data to their hosting (which anyone could move at any time), and apps like Bluesky aggregate data from everyone’s hosting.

So a concept like “Bluesky server” is nonsensical. What you have is “atproto hosting” (which can be provided by Bluesky, by other communities, by other companies, or can be self-hosted — it’s all open source and you can even implement your own) and “Bluesky app” (of which there’s only one — but there are forks like Blacksky which fork the entire stack including the server). There also “other atproto apps” like https://leaflet.pub, https://tangled.org, etc, which have nothing to do with Bluesky.

Sure, which is why it's perfectly possible to work around those restrictions using any of the alternative apps that show the same data (but don't implement the legal restrictions).

ActivityPub does not solve any of the stated goals of atproto.

Comparing ActivityPub with atproto is like pitting Email against Web. These are just differently shaped solutions to differently shaped problems.

It's not "proprietary", it's openly specified and is literally being taken to IETF: https://docs.bsky.app/blog/taking-at-to-ietf

Also, unlike ActivityPub, it's actually useful for building features that normal people expect from social apps — for example, algorithmic feeds and search, and a single interlinked world (rather than fragmented "servers").