Stephen Downes

This article from Bluesky's CTO begins with the premise that "the point of decentralization is to guarantee the rights of individuals and communities on the Internet. Pulling that off is a balancing act between practicality and ideology." It is on this basis that he describes Bluesky's hybrid structure. "Atproto isn't federation. It isn't p2p. It isn't blockchains. It's a direct attempt at practical decentralization, tradeoffs and all. We sacrificed properties of the magical mesh to hit the performance needs, and we broke from the history of federation to get the guarantees we wanted." I have a lot of sentimental attachment to Mastodon and ActivityPub, but I also recognize that there's a lot of smart thinking behind Bluesky at the ATmosphere Protocol.