I disagree with the premise here. I think the core mechanics of social media, ie instant communication between random strangers about random topics, creates toxic interactions regardless of whether it's manipulated by engagement algorithms.

Some of the most toxic conversations I've seen were on Mastodon.

If there's a healthy future for socializing on the internet, I think it will happen in small communities.

That will slow down dissemination of information, but maybe that would be a good thing.

For example:

A simple simulation of social networks rapidly reproduced three well-documented dysfunctions: partisan echo chambers, concentrated influence among a small elite, and amplification of polarized voices - creating a "social media prism" that distorts political discourse. Notably, all attempts at conscious intervention failed to help or made things worse. [1]

Rather than fostering closer relationships, the algorithms and structures underlying social media platforms inadvertently contribute to profound psychological harm - particularly among teenagers, who are disproportionately affected by curated online personas, peer pressure to present a perfect digital image, and constant notification bombardment. [2]

And from Meta's own internal UX research, surfaced in recent harm-related court filings: researchers described Instagram as functionally a drug, users as binging to the point of reward deficit, and the platform's role as that of a pusher. [3]

I've gradually opted out of social media over the last few years. That Meta internal research was the thing that finally pushed me to delete IG, the last social app I was still using. My life has been noticeably calmer and better adjusted since - which makes me skeptical that a better protocol, rather than a fundamentally different relationship with technology and socialization, is our way out of the current mess.

[1] https://arxiv.org/html/2508.03385v1 [2] https://scholar.dsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1222&con... [3] https://www.lieffcabraser.com/pdf/2025-11-21-Brief-dckt-2480... (p. 33)

But, the Fediverse never really seemed to take off in the mainstream. Mozilla launched their own mastodon instance around 2023 and then closed it in 2024. I've never heard anything about PeerTube in casual conversation, and Mastodon is not common to hear about either.

As someone with a tech degree and a liberal arts degree, I think protocols like this are excellent examples of trying to solve social issues with technology instead of policy or other approaches. I can't tell you what those other approaches would be, but I haven't seen a lot of efficacy from the purely technological ones. Eventually, the pressure of turning a profit always seems to take over, pushing the moral mission aside. Still. I'm rooting for ATProto to speak truth to power and uproot apps like X and Instagram.

This year, I'm betting less social media as being better and in the long-run a new protocol that learns from the mistakes.

In the beginning Twitter was very free and open with API access. There were plenty of alternative apps. Of course, that changed when they got serious about monetizing.

Would it really be any harder for Bluesky to switch from ATProto to a proprietary API than it was for Twitter to close their API? How many users are realistically going to download their archives and upload them to some other provider? If most people are using the website or official app, that's where the stickiness is. There would be a blog post with a title like "Supporting the Bluesky Community for the Next Century" and how it's better to have a centralized site that can feed its employees than an idealistic decentralized one that disappears. Things would seem OK at first. But enough years of chasing quarterly KPIs would put them in the same spot as Twitter and Facebook.

Are the scientists referenced in this article really so averse to having a website or corresponding via email that they need a social media instance to chat with every Tom, Dick and Harry that can't put up with the friction of clicking a mailto: link? How did that go during Covid, when everyone on Twitter suddenly became an infectious disease specialist?

> So you could use another app like Blacksky and have the same exact posts, comments, and likes that you do on Bluesky. And if you ever decide that you don’t like what Bluesky is doing [...] you can move somewhere else, keeping your followers, connections, and content.

How is that different from moving to a new web host or newsletter provider? And what happens if your Bluesky connections don't move over to the new thing? Or if Bluesky chooses to create a read-only archive of your posts and changes the UI to obscure the ATproto ID or whatever it is that certifies the content as being "yours"?

For example, pre-Elon Twitter, I thought Twitter was going to around a long time and I would continue to use it for many years. I left Twitter when Elon bought it.

While I'm on various social media sites now, I can fairly easily pick up a new one as I see fit. And if my audience doesn't want to follow me there, they don't have to. And I can find different people to follow on that new one.

You never know what is going to happen.

I feel that's been kind of absent for a while. Sure, tech is huge and there are niches, but the general zeitgeist.

Like... the tech world went from this kind of niche thing, to "hey, hackers, you could set yourself up by creating a company and then get to do what you want", which then shifted more and more towards companies, and is right now lurching towards a world where you must pay a mega AI corporation if you want your output to be competitive.

And a little bit better but still not quite there doesn't do it for me.

Based on how it was depicted, it's a site-to-site (thus P2P) based system that allows encryption, hop-via-proxy and multi-stream transport (embedding files in video call).

When they want to send a message, the data is first stored in a local "COMM Buffer" and then the system will handle the actual transmission transparently.

The data transceiving can be done in real-time if the participants are near. If not, then it will work similar to how email is exchanged (except the data stream is multimedia, not just text).

How is this relates to AT Protocol (and maybe ActivePub)? Well, AT Protocol is designed to be used in "social network" settings, but "social network" was largely evolved from people forwarding emails etc. I think if you could build a really good COMM protocol that allows people exchange information quickly and efficiently, then it should be fairly easy to add social elements on top of it.

I think the idea of building a "social network protocol" itself is wrong. People get on social media to do things, maybe it's gather info, maybe it's to learn, maybe it's to make contact etc. Maybe smart people should focus on building a protocol to enable all that, rather than just trying to build something that poorly mimics what the big platform has already perfected.

Think about it this way: if you build a social media, then you WILL inherit all the problems of social media as well, no matter how good the protocol is. So maybe just build something else instead then.

Global social networks are cancer no matter the protocol, that's my opinion after many years trying to carve out a use for them in my life. No matter how hard I try to curate my feeds, inevitably they make me more angry, sad, and combative in my online life.

The link in the article for Blacksky (blackskyweb.xyz) has a dark pattern that attempts to get you sign up for bluesky instead of blacksky. Odd.

The bigger issue is funding - currently appears to be VC funded (seed round 2023, Series A 2024), so they'll want a return at some point. Voilà, enshittification.

The biggest selling point - portable identity - is a mirage because the current providers do not give you the cryptographic keys to your identity. So they can simply lock you down, and your 'identity' is done.

They were, quite literally, designed to do this. They needed to monetize the user base to pay for the server costs. Zuck wanted a business.

Eventually I decided to prioritize my health over everything -- job, friends, extended family, hobbies -- transient relationships with things & people just don't matter any longer. If you want community you have to cultivate it and it isn't real if it isn't deeply intertwined with most of your life.

Also, owning my own copies of things too, from books to music to video tutorials. It either goes ona shelf or in the NAS and gets indexed.

[1] https://www.w3.org/groups/wg/lws/

Didn't the original facebook only show you posts of friends? Made by them or intentionally reshared by them.

Stop at that and you get rid of the influencer spam. The danger of placing yourself in a bubble is still there, but at least it's a bubble of your friends, that you could have got yourself into even in real life.

Of course, there's the question of how you finance this.

I don’t need it so much to seek an alternative.

I'd like to become social online.

You have a protocol that makes it easy to concentrate the self-same toxicity it is trying to prevent.

But, more to the point, this stuff is just Usenet where the users are the newsgroups. But that's not the basis for a community unless the user's famous. What you want is something like forums (Reddit) where people with common interests come together. Anything else is like, hyperindividualistic and isolating.

It occurred to me that "Twitter is Usenet where individual users are the topics" is peak Millennial. Dunno what I'm gonna do with that one.