@maegul so I haven’t looked myself, but I have heard other people say that when they poked around at the documentation they were horrified by it.

I guess you found it actually okay? What did you like about it?

And to lay my cards on the table, when I poked at the ActivityPub standard that horrified me. It looked completely unable to scale, and I felt like instance operators confirmed that when they started talking about the resource consumption.

I do hope that AT is better.

@volkris @maegul I do like it much more myself (I've been hacking on it since April). It fixes some issues that AP has like the ease of account migration, your identity isn't bound to the instance but instead uses a "distributed ID", the architecture seems like it should scale better, no missing replies in threads etc. It takes different tradeoffs so other people may see some aspects as downsides (no way to control who can access your content, less power given to instance admins etc.).

@mackuba @volkris@qoto.org

Interesting to hear your thoughts!

How much do you think can be built on the protocol by 3rd parties without involving bsky? Also, do you think multiple platform types could work? Like, an independent but federated Reddit substitute but with good interop with bsky itself?!

I’m also unclear on how baked in the BSG thing is to the protocol. Could parts of the network develop without connecting to the centralised services?

@maegul A lot of it is still "you gotta trust us" at the moment, but I've been watching these guys pretty closely for half a year, and I do trust them.

BGS/relay and AppView are the more centralized parts, but the plan is that once federation opens (should be early next year), anyone will be able to set up one too - although they're both pretty resource heavy, so hard to say how many there will be in practice. The code's open source, has been for a while - it's just walled off in configuration.

@mackuba see, this is the kind of thing I really focus on, the scaling of the core, not so much the scaling of userbase and use cases and such.

Without scaleable core infrastructure everyone above it is hamstrung.

You say BGS and AppView are pretty resource heavy, which is reminiscent of some of the growing pains ActivityPub has seen.

All distributed platforms face similar problems of how to transfer and synchronize content between endpoints when every single sender wants to get every single message to every single receiver, a growing list times a growing list times a growing list.

I wasn’t impressed by AP’s solution to this problem, and I wonder if AT has a solution that’s more efficient and effective.

Above you said that there were no missing replies to threads, as a sign that it should scale better, but it worries me that that level of certainty indicates that it will scale worse under the hood with senders struggling to ensure that all content gets to all receivers.

@maegul