Another blog post from Paul Frazee on the thinking behind Bluesky’s technical plumbing:

We ended up calling the AT Protocol a “federated” network because we couldn’t think of a more appropriate term, but it’s not really a kind of federation that anyone is familiar with. The peer-to-peer influence is too significant to neatly slot into that archetype. It also confuses with ActivityPub’s model of federation which is now popularly understood.

I’m following AT Protocol closely (and using it in Micro.blog!) and I still haven’t fully wrapped my head around all of this. More to learn.

@manton I’m looking forward to building some feeds and private social networks off of ATProto but every time I look into it I get super confused! Hoping somebody else (like you) will eventually be able explain it to me like a 5-year old (and yes I’ve tried ChatGPT, it doesn’t get it either!)

@manton I can't wait to see how you manage to integrate this new and promising protocol into micro.blog.

@manton would be nice to have an article differentiating the two and how Micro.blog will fit in the picture. Right now, one-way cross-posting on BlueSky is available - wondering how this would happen when there are more personal pods. :)

@manton Makes me wonder…if the protocol is so hard to learn by folks with a lot of web experience, does it have any chance of becoming dominant? Historically, it seems like the simplest, yet effective, protocols are the ones that win in the end.

@manton It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I’d like to get my hands on these various protocols to see what I think for myself. But, without having done that yet, I remain skeptical of BlueSky and their protocol… Perhaps unfair, but that’s my current bias.