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Comment by glenstein | Hacker News Reader

Twitter apparently was working on their own protocol, under a project named BlueSky. I personally feel this was unnecessary and redundant because w3c had put forward activity pub.

However, this project existed just the same. As far as I can tell, the Twitter and blog for the project have not been active since late October and I'm not sure if there's any life to it anymore.

https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog

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Bluesky is very active, we started beta testing 6 days ago https://twitter.com/arcalinea/status/1593439410699501570?s=4...

Here's a contributor's (pfraze) reason for not using ActivityPub.

https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/issues/255#issueco...

> a preference for domain usernames over AP’s double-@ email usernames

This I strongly agree.

Frontends can just support both. In Mastodon, I can search for either `@username@example.com` or `https://example.com/@username` and both will suffice to show the same result.

I prefer the email format, like username@example.com

Double @ just look so ugly.

The problem with that format is that it had better also work as an email address, because otherwise people will be extremely confused by it.

> better also work as an email address

Sure why not? Make ActivityPub work over SMTP doesn't sounds like a bad idea.

That would imply that's an email, when in fact it's just a fedi account. It's there for a reason, another one (besides accessibility) is to make it easier parsing for other instances.

BlueSky is completely different from AP.

BlueSky is closer to decentralized SNS, where as AP is actively seeking to become a federated SNS. BlueSky uses DID and independent data repositories, which allows freely migrating b/w instances. AP simply does federation b/w rather classical blog hosting apps.

AP is ActivityPub, the protocol behind Mastodon. But what is SNS? What is DID?

SNS is the usual Social Network Service.

DID is Decentralized IDentifier. It's a design for decentralized identity registries, independent of central ID providers and authorities. Anyone can verify identity without going through the issuer. This is generally considered as a blockchain tech, though the spec is written in a generic way.

I though Bluesky was Jack's pet project and unrelated to Twitter Inc.

It was funded by Twitter, but under a separate organization.

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