I have some thoughts on ActivityPub vs the AT Protocol. Firstly, I the the protocols are more interesting than the products currently built on them (Mastodon and friends vs Bluesky).

ActivityPub was one of the first attempts to create a protocol for decentralised social media.

It was finalised in 2018 after a small team worked on it for several years. It nearly didn’t happen at all. Mastodon is the flagship app using ActivityPub but there are a bunch of other including PeerTube and PixelFed.

I love the idea of ActivityPub as it’s an open, web native protocol.

ActivityPub is not without its problems though. One of the main ones being account migration. Right now it relies on your old server being online and it doesn’t migrate your existing content, just your social graph.

The fact that it is a reasonably mature protocol with a lot of services build on it means that any changes are now pretty tricky to implement without potentially breaking those existing services.

None of these problems are unsolvable but it’s going to be tricky.

At this point ActivityPub will have to deal with the first mover disadvantage. Competing standards like the AT protocol can take a look at what does/doesn’t work and improve on it.

AT and Bluesky specifically has also arrived at just the right time to take advantage of Twitter imploding.

A huge advantage that ActivtyPub and Mastodon have over Bluesky is that they are not VC backed. Sure, they still need money and funding but they don’t have investors eagerly awaiting a profit, so they can focus on building things with users as the no.1 priority.

Wether that will matter or not I don’t know, but what I do know is that these protocols don’t need to be seen as competitors. The rising tide of decentralisation lifts all boats.