A coherent protocol punishes partial adoption. Hypothesis: Anyone who tries to merely piggyback onto ATProto for bandwagoning (eg. by using identity to hoover the social graph while trying to control data) will be outcompeted by those who fully embrace the protocol’s potential.
Mar 7, 2026 at 12:23 PM
A conceptual model of ATProto and ActivityPub
If you were to design an open social networking protocol, what would that look like? Which metaphors and comparisons would you use to get a general idea of how the network functions? And what would you answer if people ask if your network is decentralised and federated?
Rewilding the internet with ATProto
So far, many of the projects in the ATProtocol ecosystem have focused on bringing parity—making projects that replicate our existing tools and platforms, but with the affordances of the protocol instead. That's cool and we need to do that, but I think we can go much farther, and take this opportunity to challenge some of the biggest assumptions of what the modern internet is for, who builds it, and how we interact with it. This talk is in conversation with several of the talks from last year, and in I'll argue that we'll never get away from skeuomorphism until we've fundamentally changed the definition of what "the social internet" means in the first place.
The Unreasonable Sufficiency of Protocols Web
The Unreasonable Sufficiency of Protocols Venkatesh Rao, Tim Beiko, Danny Ryan, Josh Stark, Trent Van Epps, and Bastian Aue 1. Introduction Complex coordination problems have an air of doomed intractability about them. We speak in fatalistic terms of economics being a “dismal” science, of sociological phenomena being dominated by the
A Self-Authenticating Social Protocol - Bluesky
Bluesky’s mission is to drive the evolution from platforms to protocols. The conceptual framework we've adopted for meeting this objective is the "self-authenticating protocol."
Protocol Reader - Summer of Protocols
In the Fall of 2022, the word protocol was suddenly everywhere. The proximal cause was obvious: fueled, in part, by the highly visible and fractious change of ownership at Twitter, large numbers of people began heading for the exits. Most of them, of course, were just looking for
Dangerous Protocols - Summer of Protocols
Protocols are frequently touted as the liberating alternative to walled technological gardens, but the historical purpose of protocols has always been to simplify decision-making and reduce human agency. How do we reconcile these two narratives? I explore the dangerous side of protocols, and how their ability to drive coordination means they also have
The web was always social Diving into the idea of bridging different social networks and protocols like ATproto and ActivityPub to enhance the web. Looking back at my personal web journey, from Web 2.0 to now, emphasizing that building connections... herve.bzh/the-web-was-always-social/
The web was always social
herve.bzhI'm convinced that open social protocols like #atproto have a crucial role to play in the future of science. Excited to share MOSAIC - our best effort at articulating the thesis, why it matters, and how to build and fund it (in collab w/ @exgenesis.ingroup.social ) 🧵
MOSAIC — Modular Open Science, AI & Collective Intelligence
mosaic-program.orgthis is, I think, the path to atproto victory: social platforms have become samey network effect vehicles that exist only to copy each others' features, so all atproto has to do is build a large enough network effect of its own that it can absorb closed socials' features in the same way
norvid_studies
one thing is it seems there's a lot more fast copying for eg every 'social' thing converging on shortform video / all kind of looking like each other but with their existing users. this is a very anecdotal impression though
Some of us in the ActivityPub world feel jealous of AtProto’s success (like me). But more decentralization is a win for everyone. With Bridgy from @anew.social connecting protocols, this isn’t competition, it’s momentum. We’re stronger together, so let’s build the social web humanity deserves 🚀
#ATProto is giving Major Evolutionary Transition vibes: "(1) a new form of cooperation with almost total interdependence among individuals ... that creates a new functional entity, and (2) a ... new form of communication to support this cooperation." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Major_Transitions_in…
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ATProto is a post-app protocol trapped in a world of apps. I can feel it all around the edges of the network.
Many people are talking about decentralized social media protocols like #ActivityPub and #ATProto and all the amazing things one can do with them. But do you actually know how they work? We thought we'd do something about this. Come to #FediForum next week if you are curious and like to find […]
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