In the beginning there was the protocol

I was initially excited about Mastodon social publishing website based on ActivityPub protocol. The ability for anyone to host their own data on their own Mastodon instance really appealed to me - like hosting your own website. However the reality is most people are just not that technical or don't want the constant maintenance overheads of maintaining and policing an instance. So they will usually just use a shared instance. For sure thousand did create their own instance, but millions didn't. For those that didn't they will quickly find that shared instances have their own rules (like a Reddit community does) and might have reliability issues. They might even find their instance banned from connections with other instances because of rules enforced outside their instance. Facing such headwinds they might think "well I'll just move my account to another instance". Yes, that works, and most of your followers will end up following you there via the protocol's ability to support moving identities. But there's a catch: all your previous posts and replies don't move. Your data stays on the original instance - assuming it didn't go broke, forcibly delete your account, or get itself cut off from the "Fediverse". This is a limitation of the architecture of ActivityPub, apparently there to avoid duplication or manipulation of posts. So unless you started your Mastodon life on your own solely controlled instance you're stuck. For me, as I used Mastodon more and more, that became an existential threat. Since I'd started out using mastodon.social as my instance and there were increasing calls to boycott it for its lack of moderation about one thing or the other it felt like it could end up in its own isolated universe like Truth Social (which uses ActivityPub). That defeated the point to me. Then I heard about Bluesky which uses its own new AT Protocol and I discovered that a core feature of the architecture is data portability across what they call Personal Data Servers (PDS). At the time (2024) portability was largely theoretical since there weren't any real alternatives to the main Bluesky Social PDS beyond running your own. Furthermore even if there were alternative PDS out there there were no front ends for accessing said data. You had to go via Blueskys and be limited to their features - like post length, no editing, no promise against future advertising. Mercifully there is still no advertising two years later, but there's also no way to edit your posts either. However fast forward to now and yes I am starting to see PDS alternatives starting to appear. For instance two European efforts are in the news - just recently Swiss based wsocial.eu is starting to take beta sign ups, and eurosky.social is already up and running publicly with over 7,000 accounts using them. The latter even has their own frontend mu.social albeit looking remarkably like a clone of the main Bluesky one Now granted these alternatives (see table of the top ten by users below) have a tiny fraction of the total of ~63 million users but it shows there is interest and effort. Although daily Bluesky usage has been declining over the last year or more since the initial boost from the Musk inspired Twitter diaspora I'm hopeful it could be an inflection point and within a year or so we may see real growth across the entire AT Protocol, not just Bluesky's servers. I believe a growing anti-AI anti-Meta (Facebook, Instagram, and Threads) anti-Musk (Twitter aka X) sentiment and existence of solid non-US alternatives - perhaps ones endorsed by sovereign entities or bolstered by legislation limiting use of US based ones - will reinvigorate interest in decentralized AT Protocol based social media. In my opinion its true data and entity portability is a strong selling point. Another would be if the company behind Bluesky.social eventually adds advertising to their frontend. This could really drive interest in migration elsewhere, and once people have done it once and discovered it just works they will gain knowledge of their data freedom and be converts. It is something you simply cannot do with X, Threads, or Facebook. Your data + your identity = your life! Another very interesting initiative is standard.site which is one of the first, if not the first, non-social media apps based on top of AT Protocol. Standard.site lets people publish long form content as they might have done before with a website or blog and have it "socialized" via AT Protocol. Bluesky and other users of AT Protocol based social apps can then subscribe to it, recommend it, and link to it. If the user finds that the standard.site service they are using doesn't work for them, or they want to run their own, then they can simply move the content from the PDS to somewhere else and their subscribers and recommendation all follow the content. So right now I see offprint.app, leaflet.pub, and pckt.blog as options (I picked Offprint at the time of publishing) for hosting standard.site publishing. This standard.site initiative aims to marry publishing of long form content with the social networking to enhance the fundamental interconnectedness of all things that with AT Protocol. Basically it makes Bluesky frontends act like an RSS Reader did for websites. It's very early days for all these things - user accounts are low, the amount of content is tiny - but I see the right moves happening here. A decentralized protocol based system is the right way, not massive centralized walled gardens run by billionaire elites. Meta and others have no interest in building something like it since it would take the platform out of their control, allow people to see content without their ads, and for users to simply leave their eyeball realestate. As I mentioned standard.site is just the first or one of the first applications built on top of the AT Protocol other than the original "social media" app Bluesky. It is to AT Protocol as PixelFed, an Instagram alternative, is to ActivityPub. There is now a community for those developing new apps for AT Protocol and they are calling the atmosphere.community Again the key advantage with AT Protocol over ActivityPub is data portability which coupled with identity portability gets decentralized everything exactly right.