This page provides a measurement of Bluesky PBC's control over various components of the AT Protocol social network infrastructure. It tracks the distribution of power across key protocol elements, helping to assess the current state of decentralization and identify areas where centralized control may need to be reduced to achieve the protocol's long-term vision of a truly distributed social network.

This post is a blogpost version of a recent talk that Daniel Holmgren gave at AtmosphereConf (March 2025).

AT Protocol (or atproto) is a protocol for creating decentralized social applications.

It's not the first protocol with that aim to exist. In the history of decentralized social media protocols, atproto takes a unique approach which is still deeply influenced by technologies and movements that came before it.

The phrase “atproto ethos” often comes up during our protocol design discussions. It's a fuzzy term, but we use it to refer to the philosophical and aesthetic principles that underlie the design of the network.

In this post, we'll distill that ethos. First, we look at the movements in technology that have most directly influenced atproto.Then, we pull out the core innovations that atproto brought to the table. Finally, we highlight some opinionated ways of thinking that influenced the design.

• Added a Mastodon importer to move your Mastodon posts to your WordPress site.
• User setting to enable/disable Likes and Reblogs
• + a ton of fixes

Mar 13, 2025

We have a temporary glitch with GitHub—probably some contributor was geolocated in a sanctioned region (no details yet). All required documents to unlock the account have been uploaded. Don't blame Microsoft/GitHub - it is just U.S. law. Please be patient. It should be unblocked soon.

Mar 27, 2025

GitHub has gone - long live Forgejo (@forgejo).

Fully migrated out of Microsoft’s walled garden after they blocked us:

• 54k commits
• 9.5k issues
• 4.3k pull requests
• 100k comments

Everything moved. Nothing left behind.

https://git.omaps.dev/organicmaps/organicmaps

What cons of decentralised social media do you see? I read that it's mostly about moderation challenges and regulatory compliance. What do you think?

I'm working on a project called WebMirror that allows visitors to access websites in a decentralised fashion by fetching their content from mirrors (like BitTorrent but) just using a browser (without having to install any additional software including browser extensions).

I've a technology demo for it already (https://webmirror-demo.netlify.app/) but it's mostly interesting from a technical standpoint. I'm trying to find a kind of website and/or content on the Web that would benefit from being mirrored. For example, OpenFreeMap is a great example of that (free map tiles for everyone), but it's just that the dataset is much bigger than my project could support (28.33 million files).

―Bora

More discussion on Mastodon: https://mastodon.online/@mastodonmigration/113819523685288481

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.

[...] I mostly believed that anything I had to say on the subject would not be received productively, and so I figured it was best to reserve comment to myself and those close to me. But recently I have received some direct encouragement from a core Bluesky developer that they have found my writings insightful and useful and would be happy to see me write on the subject. So here are my thoughts.

[...] Bluesky and ATProto are not meaningfully decentralized, and are not federated either. However, this is not to say that Bluesky is not achieving something useful; while Bluesky is not building what is presently a decentralized Twitter, it is building an excellent replacement for Twitter, and Bluesky's main deliverable goal is something else instead: a Twitter replacement, with the possibility of "credible exit".

Also see, part 2: Re: Re: Bluesky and Decentralization

The changelog released today for Play Store 44.1 says this “Share apps feature on Google Play will be retiring.”

At the time, Google billed this feature as a way to send and receive Android apps without Wi-Fi or cellular connectivity. Peer-to-peer sharing can also conserve data and is ideal for places with slow networks

You can still use Files by Google to share Android applications in a similar manner. Under Categories, go to “Apps” and then the overflow menu for what you want to “Share.”

MirrorBrain is an open source framework to run a content delivery network using mirror servers. It solves a challenge that many popular open source projects face - a flood of download requests, often magnitudes more than any single site could practically handle.

Since the outset of Matrix, our aim has always been to provide a protocol that lets you build open, decentralised, secure communication apps which outperform the mainstream centralised alternatives. It’s been a twisty journey - first focusing on making Matrix work at all (back in 2014), and then getting it out of beta with Matrix 1.0 in 2019, and now focusing on making Matrix fast, usable and mainstream-ready with Matrix 2.0.

Crossposted from !bluesky@lemmy.ml: https://lemmy.ml/post/21473941