The fact of the matter is that there are now two standards – ATProto and ActivityPub – making the same fundamental claims to being the open standard that allows for decentralized social media.

Another fact is that ATProto and ActivityPub are architecturally very, very different. The former is what Christine Lemmer-Webber calls a “shared heap” structure, where an installation requires access to all the posts in the network, while the latter is server software that sends and fetches messages as the necessity arises. ATProto allows for “Personal Data Servers” – but these would rely on an infrastructure of indexes that likely will be prohibitively expensive. An ActivityPub server can run on a cheap server and still be a fully-fledged member of the fediverse.

Another fact is that both are overseen by very different bodies and both have come from very different processes. ActivityPub was developed at the W3C largely independent of corporate interests. The W3C remains the steward of ActivityPub. ATProto was born at Twitter and spun out into a separate, venture-capital funded corporation. While the Bluesky corporation promised in 2023 ATProto development will be shifted to the IETF, this still has not happened, and ATProto development is closely tied to a corporation that no doubt faces pressure to be profitable.

Your data, such as your posts, likes, and follows, needs to be stored somewhere. With traditional social media, your data is stored by the social media company whose services you've signed up for. If you ever want to stop using that company's services, you can do that—but you would have to leave that social network and lose your existing connections.
It doesn't have to be this way! An alternative model is how the internet itself works. Anyone can put up a website on the internet. You can choose from one of many companies to host your site (or even host it yourself), and you can always change your mind about this later. If you move to another hosting provider, your visitors won't even notice. No matter where your site's data is managed and stored, your visitors can find your site simply by typing the name of the website or by clicking a link.
We think social media should work the same way. When you register on Bluesky, by default we'll suggest that Bluesky will store your data.
But if you'd like to let another company store it, or even store it yourself, you can do that. You'll also be able to change your mind at any point, moving your data to another provider without losing any of your existing posts, likes, or follows. From your followers' perspective, your profile is always available at your handle—no matter where your information is actually stored, or how many times it has been moved.

For years, the internet has been shrinking. Not in size, not in data, but in ownership. A vast, decentralized network of personal blogs, forums, and independent communities has been corralled into a handful of paved prison yards controlled by a few massive corporations. Every post, every “friend,” every creative work—locked behind closed doors, and you don’t have the keys.

The fediverse is a jailbreak. It’s not a product, not a single platform, it’s not something you can buy stock in or use to enrich yourself at the cost of our shared humanity. It’s a network of independent, interconnected social platforms, all running on open protocols like ActivityPub. It’s an ecosystem where you - not some incellionaire obsessed with eugenics - own your digital identity. Where your social graph belongs to you, not an algorithm’s shifting fucking whims. Where moving from one service to another doesn’t mean losing everything you’ve built and everything you’ve ever said.

The IndieWeb is a people-focused alternative to the “corporate web”.