Is ATProto federated, P2P, or a protocol flexible enough to build all kinds of things?
Is it opinionated about which type of system to build?
Skimming this page, it looks like ATProto is a schema for the ontology, and despite saying "P2P", it looks built around federation and concerned about scaling infrastructure (rather than scaling message broadcast).
I'm interested in a p2p social network with federated supernodes (p2p first class, federation second class, relays for devices that don't want to join the swarm) for people and agents. Could you easily build that with ATProto, or is it the wrong domain?
I'm interested in true, first-class P2P. Not a bolt-on afterthought. That's the problem with all of these federated services like Bluesky and Mastodon.
A true social protocol should work like email. Any machine on the network should be able to talk it to any other machine. Of course centralization nodes will appear, but they should be optional. Used as aids for user friendliness, anonymity, and firewalling yourself off.
Mastodon works like email. Users have their data hosted on instances and most big instances can communicate with most other big instances, and all instances blacklist a bunch of other instances for spam or political reasons. Just like e-mail.
ATProto is definitely not P2P and probably not federated. Every user has their own personal storage and gives apps like Bluesky permission to write to them.
They solve different problems and, in theory, you can use ATProto and ActivityPub (Mastodon/Threads/Peertube/etc) together
Is it opinionated about which type of system to build?
Skimming this page, it looks like ATProto is a schema for the ontology, and despite saying "P2P", it looks built around federation and concerned about scaling infrastructure (rather than scaling message broadcast).
I'm interested in a p2p social network with federated supernodes (p2p first class, federation second class, relays for devices that don't want to join the swarm) for people and agents. Could you easily build that with ATProto, or is it the wrong domain?
I'm interested in true, first-class P2P. Not a bolt-on afterthought. That's the problem with all of these federated services like Bluesky and Mastodon.
A true social protocol should work like email. Any machine on the network should be able to talk it to any other machine. Of course centralization nodes will appear, but they should be optional. Used as aids for user friendliness, anonymity, and firewalling yourself off.