If I host my own identity server can I bypass the need for an invite? Maybe it's this? https://github.com/bluesky-social/indigo
Go to https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto, clone it, build and run via the makefile.
There are already some instances running but as said they do not federate at the moment.
Perhaps the aim is the idea of federation but in practice have everyone sign up to server they control.
But nobody asks that you join now, just wait for federation if that’s what you care about.
- Screwing something up impacts 100k people and not 10M people.
- Users have some expectation of "hiccups" in something presented as a beta product.
- Prevents bots from taking over the platform as the anti-spam / anti-abuse systems mature.
Also, I kinda want this to fail. Mastodon is the right way forward from the twitter debacle.
The only thing Mastodon has to do to "win" is continue to exist and thrive in its niche while the lumbering,, centralized corporate social media dinosaurs choke to death around them.
And you may want to look at the team and how they justify their choices before arriving to a conclusion.
Sure, nobody has ever built a decentralized social network at scale before, but we're not blundering our way into this.
You gave me a list of people and technologies they worked on, but you didn't answer the question. How do you bring that together into a decentralized system that can absorb and succeed Twitter?
From a technical perspective the architecture is very similar to Twitter or other social networks internally, just pieced apart with some cryptography added to allow different components to not have to fully trust eachother. Thats to say, the components individually scale the same as twitter does (probably better tbh, we’re building this with 2023 tech not 2005 tech). Im happy to dive into that more but I actually dont think the technology is the hard part.
The bulk of the work is culture and community building and maintenance. One of the biggest things we’ve been focused on getting right is moderation, and the federated architecture helps a lot here. Allowing “third party” labeling to be integrated into the experience seamlessly allows communities to choose their own way of curating their experience. Instead of relying on a single company to dictate “the rules” you just pick “the rules” you want and go from there. There’s obviously a lot more to it, so id encourage you to check out some of our other blog posts: https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog
EDIT: I see https://atproto.com/guides/faq#why-not-use-activitypub was linked below, but it would be nice to read something a bit more in-depth than that.