







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?
ActivityPub
ActivityPub is a protocol and open standard for decentralized social networking. It provides a client-to-server (C2S) API for creating and modifying content, as well as a federated server-to-server (S2S) protocol for delivering notifications and content to other servers. ActivityPub is the defining standard of the Fediverse, a decentralised social network of various social interaction models, and content types, which consists of independently managed instances of software such as Mastodon, Pixelfed and PeerTube, among others.
What is atproto?
What is atproto? atproto is two things: A protocol for creating open social networks An open social network atproto, the open social network Today the atproto network has 36+ million users and powers Bluesky and a handful of other apps. Almost all atproto data is public. Content like posts, likes, follows, and photos/videos are publicly accessible to any network participant in a permissionless way. As an example of how open the network is, here’s how easy it is to stream all public data on the network using a public atproto Relay like bsky.network:

How decentralized is Bluesky really? -- Dustycloud Brainstorms
Recently due to various events (namely a lot of people getting off of X-Twitter), Bluesky has become a lot more popular, and excitement for its underlying protocol, ATProto, is growing. Since I worked on ActivityPub which connects together Mastodon, Sharkey, Peertube, GotoSocial, etc, etc, etc in the present-day fediverse, I often get asked whether or not I have opinions about ATProto vs ActivityPub, and the answer is that I do have opinions, but I am usually head-down focused on building what I hope to be the next generation of decentralized (social) networking tech, and so I keep to myself about such things except in private channels.
Where Does Community Live?
ActivityPub and ATProto both promise to rebuild social life online, but they answer the question of where community actually forms in fundamentally different ways. Protocol design is institutional design, and right now those institutions are being built.

atproto academy
Your resource for learning the decentralized social networking protocol powering the future of social media.
ActivityPub
The ActivityPub protocol is a decentralized social networking protocol based upon the [ActivityStreams] 2.0 data format. It provides a client to server API for creating, updating and deleting content, as well as a federated server to server API for delivering notifications and content.
Open Social
Open Social
I'm building on atproto because I think that a single social network has essentially no shot of dethroning the current tech monopolies. But an open ecosystem of interoperating apps is so infinitely more interesting than legacy social that it seems almost inevitable it will win
Ronen Tamari
Can everyone building on atproto please answer this question? 😇
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 […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.socialSome 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 🚀
Stratos
Permissioned Data Diary 3: Your Bucket, My Data - Daniel's Leaflets
Permissioned Data Diary 2: Buckets - Daniel's Leaflets
Spaces as Layers - Nick's Blog