The #ATProto clone of Substack you were waiting for, and it looks really good: @offprint.app@bsky.brid.gy news.offprint.app/a/3mhwzjidib...
Offprint News | Offprint
atproto
When TikTok’s future felt uncertain, Tori White saw an opportunity.
On the latest Dot Social, @mike sits down with Skylight Social's CEO to talk about building a creator-first video platform on the AT Protocol. Watch the episode here, or find it wherever you get your podcasts.
https://flipboard.video/w/c9tgxs6U6WonWJwAXYh9vH
#DotSocial #Podcast #OpenSocial #ATProto #ATmosphereConf #Skylight #TikTok
I noticed with some Japanese ATproto apps, the login system is hardcoded to bsky.app so if you are in a different PDS, you can not login.***いくつかの日本のATprotoアプリで気づいたのですが、ログインシステムがbsky.appにハードコードされているので、別のPDSにいるとログインできません。#ATmosphere #ATproto
RE: https://mas.to/@Aubreader/116330793703168577
This article is a must read.
An excerpt: “Why would anyone fund an Atmosphere project if #Bluesky, with $100 million in the bank, might ship a competing feature at any moment? Why would a founder bet their career on this ecosystem? The presentation didn't just hurt Graze. It made the entire ecosystem look unfundable.”
Why do I keep bringing up this topic?
Because #ATproto is often put in the same category as #ActivityPub (“open protocols yay”) but I strongly disagree with that stance
Interesting things are happing in the Atmosphere (the network built out around Bluesky and their ATProto protocol).
"With Acorn, Blacksky is providing access to these same tools to other communities that want to build their own spaces on the open social web."
#news #technology #TechNews #atmosphere #ATProto #bluesky #blacksky #BlackskyAcorn
RE: https://ec.social-network.europa.eu/@EUCommission/116766280029168108
"W Social" is launching their beta today today, following Eurosky as another European AT Protocol based Bluesky-compatible platform. W's distinctiveness is that it requires identity verification, using the separate "W identity" app that "scans your passport or national identity card and verifies you directly on your own device."
Unsurprisingly, W has a lot of backing from EU power structure -- including Ursula von der Leyen -- and their advisory board includes luminaries like Marc Placzek, Chief Privacy Officer at Sam Altman's Tools for Humanity (makers of the Orb identity verification device). A cynic might say that it's being built as a platform designed to fit in well with the surveillance-industrial complex.
So, it'll be interesting to see how it works out. See the replies for some good articles on W social.
So I usually hate sending over bluesky links anywhere since I'm not a fan, but Rob Ricci highlights some important distinctions between #activitypub and #atproto
Fundamentally, activitypub is designed to be useful with a partial view of the network. (Narrowing down to #mastodon here) Likes are communicated, mentions are communicated, and so on.
Over at atproto land, you have no option but to write to your repo, and so you have no choice but to view the entire network to say, find replies and such (narrowing to #bluesky here). So the only way you can get your data is to read the network and filter it yourself, or have someone else do it for you, which doesn't solve the problem, only shift it.
Inkwell is an in-progress @standard.site@bsky.brid.gy iOS reading and writing client.
It currently supports @pckt.blog, @leaflet.pub@bsky.brid.gy, @offprint.app@bsky.brid.gy and @markpub.at@bsky.brid.gy.
Please do help out with development.
github.com/ewanc26/inkwell
#iOS #Swiftlang #ATProto #Blogging
Have you seen this blog post?
It confirms, from first-hand experience, most of the points I made in an earlier post and its follow-up.
#ActivityPub #Fediverse #Mastodon #ATProto #Bluesky
Edited 78d ago
Scoop: #WSocial has been experiencing major technical problems for over a week: it is effectively a ghost town, filled with thousands of new accounts that cannot use the platform.
Because my new article contains a possible solution to their problem, by the time you read this the issue may have been fixed. Or not. It has been going on for 7+ days, with complete radio silence by its developers and founders.
My exclusive:
🔗 : https://blog.elenarossini.com/w-social-a-broken-ghost-town/
Here's an idea: #ATproto service, app developers, hire frontliners (customer support, tech support, bug collector and reporter, community manager) and back-office (documentation, translator).
Why do everything yourself when there are a lot of #ATmosphere folks looking for a paid #job?
One thing I keep coming back to when comparing #ActivityPub and AT Protocol: ActivityPub is basically a convention on top of the #web stuff we already have. An actor is a JSON-LD document you GET. An inbox is an endpoint you POST to. If you already run a website, you can bolt this on without changing the site's basic shape. Ghost didn't set out to join the #fediverse, and then years later it could, just by adding an endpoint.
AT Protocol feels less like that to me. Running a PDS means a signed repo, a Merkle search tree, a firehose, a DID. It's not a layer you add to an existing site. It's closer to standing up another backend beside it.
I think that's why ActivityPub keeps making sense to me. You can join later. You don't have to have built the whole thing with federation in mind from day one.
Edited 63d ago
Are you a fan of #MUD #MUSH #MOO games? You know, text-based games running over telnet? Now imagine that running over #ATproto.
Welcome to @atmud.net@bsky.brid.gy , an #ATmosphere MUD game you can play on your browser.
Come and join! atmud.net
#gaming #games (No, I'm not affiliated with them.)
AtMUD
Want an update on the Weekend at Bernie’s clown show that is W Social? No? Me neither, but here we are…
So before we start, let’s recount the whole dystopian raison d’être of these Davosian clowns: to be a EU®opean “alternative to X” that – cue the 1984 theme tune – verifies your identity to ensure that only “real people” are on it (real is what your government says it is).
Now, let’s fast forward to last week, when TikTok set up an account on W Social.
That’s nice, isn’t it? One surveillance capitalist lending their support to another? Kumbaya and all that. The only problem? (spoiler alert), it wasn’t TikTok. (Shocking, I know.)
The account, Identity Verified™ by EU X – sorry, W Social, was a spam account and immediately labelled as such by BlueSky moderators. (Don’t you love a “decentralised” system where a post on an EU server, accessed from another EU server, is moderated by our benevolent Big Brother in Trumpland, by the way? I know it just warms the cockles of my heart. So much sovereignty! But I digress…)
So @_elena calls them out (someone has to while @EUCommission is busy preparing for their honeymoon after expressing their undying devotion to W Social recently on every social platform¹):
https://mu.social/profile/elenarossini.com/post/3mqob7shxks2t
Anna Zeiter – W CEO, Stanford’s own, and ex-eBay executive (such sovereignty) – replies with this absolute zinger:
> “We are just verifying if some [sic] is a human and at least 18 years old. Users are then free to choose their own user name. This (human) user apparently chose the name TikTok.“ (https://mu.social/profile/anna.wsocial.eu/post/3mqoepm7m2k2z)
Read that as many times as you like until it really sinks in.
These incompetent clowns (dangerous competent clowns but incompetent clowns nevertheless) make people go through a ridiculous 13-step identity verification stage² and then… umm… you get to choose whatever identity you want.
🤡🤡🤡
Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad they’re incompetent. It would be worse if they were competent, given they’re a closed-source venture-capital-funded startup determined to prove your identity.
> “Yes we have a business model, it’s not a philanthropy, we are not a B corp, we actually want to make money.” – Anna Zeiter³
But, what I want to know is this: Why has @EUCommission embraced a proprietary, closed-source, corporate ghost town with 14,300 accounts, 90% of which have not posted even once (in other words, with only 1,259 accounts that have ever posted)⁴ when there is a thriving non-corporate fediverse with millions of active people on it.
Could it have anything to do with identity verification, surveillance, and control?
And if so, why can’t they even get that right?
Looking forward to seeing how long @EUCommission can drag the corpse of W Social around before people realise it’s dead.
Oh, and how does this make the whole “European alternatives” thing look? Not good. Not because there aren’t excellent European alternatives but because the folks at the commission are either too clueless or too corrupt to recognise and support them.
So, yeah, how’s your Monday going?
¹ e.g., https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/116770333053823108, etc.
² https://aseachange.com/@elena/statuses/01KVD55YBYVM3B46ACQTECDMT2
³ https://blog.elenarossini.com/the-untold-story-about-w-social-unconventional-beginnings-strategic-pitches-conflicting-signals/ (from the YouTube video that they since deleted. Nice transparency there, clowns.)
⁴ Run this script in Node 18+ to reproduce the numbers from their PDS yourself: https://codeberg.org/aral/gists/src/branch/main/wsocial-pds-stats.js Also see https://blog.elenarossini.com/w-social-a-broken-ghost-town/ and https://blog.elenarossini.com/w-social-fictional-metrics-and-the-beauty-of-open-data/
#WSocial #EU #sovereignty #socialMedia #socialNetworking #mastodon #fediverse #activityPub #ATProto #startups #EUCommission
Edited 52d ago
What are the most important issues and discussions about the Open Social Web we need to have this late summer and fall?
#FediForum #FediForumFriday #ActivityPub #ATProtocol #Fediverse #atproto