> Social media was supposed to connect us, but most of it has turned into ads, division, and loneliness. I'm betting on ATProto as a way to fix that
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.
Content and opinions that change like the weather, just for clicks and engagement. It’s a long way from integrity and responsibility from these influencers.
> 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.
Larry Wall said, way back in the 1990ies,
"The social dynamics of the net are a direct consequence of the fact that
nobody has yet developed a Remote Strangulation Protocol."
Which is kind of correlated to the fact that being behind a keyboard feels different to people than being face to face.
I think that Larry's mostly kidding and it's not really some implied threat of violence in person. Just that we're better at politeness and restraint in person because we see a real human in front of us instead of something abstract on a screen.
We can either use our real names (bad plan IMHO) or deal with the fact that without the consequences of our actions, there are a lot of arseholes around.
Moderation is the answer, I think there's no way around that. HN show's that it can be done well, reddit show's that it can be done badly. Twitter show's what happens when it's not done (yes I'm being a little extreme there).
Real names didn't stop people from being arseholes on Facebook. They did lose a lot of friends, but they also found like minded friends, so kind of a wash.
> 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.
I think that is why I still trust Mastodon/ActivityPub a lot more than Bluesky/ATProto. Mastodon at least provides the tools for small communities. Big instances still exist. Pile ons and drive-bys are still possible. But also Mastodon has plenty of small instances including many one-person instances. Even out of the box small instances are smaller overall traffic among the great river of ActivityPub. But also forks like Hometown exist for adding extra, simple "picket fences" around small communities. A "complete" view of ActivityPub is intentionally hard to get. By comparison, ATProto seems to me overfocused on the Relay system as a grand centralizing data bus and missing pieces of a conversation seen as much more of a bug rather than a feature (of ActivityPub).
I also think the future is healthier in the hands of smaller communities. I can teach someone how to effectively use Mastodon for small communities across an almost nice spectrum of "insular" with useful options on both sides from strangers tolerated to strangers mostly unwelcome (though that starts to lead away from Mastodon and back towards classic forum software). I don't see how to do anything like that with Bluesky and a lot of the design decisions of ATProto seem intentionally to try to avoid small communities.
I'm not convinced it is social media wholesale, rather it is about size. Platforms like microblogging are more about the person, the quips, the dunking.
If you are in any small communities using social platforms like Discord/Signal (chat rooms) or Discourse (forum), it's a very different feel. Most are genuinely positive experiences.
I suppose it depends on how one defines social media. My definitions are more flexible than they used to be.
Once someone builds a reasonable Google+ clone on ATProto or ActivityPub I'd probably switch to that. I don't think we've solved reputation when it comes to decentralized identity providers yet either.
In the old days of the Internet where everyone was pretty much anonymous you were exposed to a reality where anyone could prove you wrong. You spent a few years online you grew accustomed of the idea that there are people there much more knowledgeable than you. It didn’t bother you that much to be wrong because everyone is wrong on something and this shaped your tolerance. You enter the social media now and that tolerance goes out of the window because you can block people, delete their comments and reign supreme in your ignorance.
I'm a fan of smaller communities that are semi-open: invite-only, but invites aren't that hard to get. Lobsters works that way. The BlueSky folks are designing "permission spaces" [1] that might be used to build that, though it's a bit early to say.
Bluesky/ATProto is (for all that concerns non-developers) a Twitter clone. I think the nostalgia of pre-enschitifed socials is pushing us to try and recreate the experience but I don’t think it would work because it’s not 2010 anymore.
Mastodon/ActivityPub has a lot more to offer than mastodon.social but getting to that also means leaving the Twitter look and feel and folks realising they don’t have to follow trends set for them by influencers and big VC funded operations. If it’s really a social experience, it should have a people-first focus.
And it really is not about protocols - at the end of the day, email and RSS can also form a social network.
This _isn’t_ the core mechanism of social media. When social media took off, Facebook and Instagram that really did allow you to connect with people that you knew from real life. Twitter was different, and more like microblogging, but I still see the real value of social media to be what the un-shitty versions of Facebook and Instagram were.
> instant communication between random strangers about random topics
Yes, but it requires both parts. HN works fine between random strangers, and random topics work fine with people you know. Its the combination that is toxic.
I find that this also applies to engagement. I’ve compulsively used Mastodon and this very site, neither of which you would probably claim to be very maliciously designed.
> Some of the most toxic conversations I've seen were on Mastodon
I second this. Even moderation of mastodon.social and related OSS projects is toxic. It was the biggest disappointment of the last couple of years to me, even worse than Twitter ever had been.
Please commit to your beliefs and sign out, don't come back, if you think that way about social media. Stop proving your point wrong by using social media like hacker news comments, if you think social media so blanketly bad, useless, & ineffective.
IMO there's huge value, these are amazing connective spaces. The sheer rank pitiful nihilism of these grievance-only walk-away shut-down views is totally unacceptable, is unhelpful in extreme, is not going to move things along in any useful way, and we need to figure out how to actually improve broadly, socially.
I can't stand that such energy drain vampire viewpoints get upvoted so consistently. Stop sucking all the energy from the room, stop draining those who want to try, especially as you use the medium you are also decrying as garbage, and log off and don't post at all. We don't deserve to be continually undermined by sucking empty try-nothing dont-care nihilism.
How does ATProto solve the problems that the last 10–20 years have shown seem intrinsic to all social media once it hits a certain scale?
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.
I'd be curious to see how ATProto stacks up against ActivityPub in the long run. I was very excited by the prospects of Mastodon, PeerTube, and a few other Fediverse apps. I even started implementing my own ActivityPub library based on their RFC before I fizzled out.
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.
Focusing on protocol and decentralisation is putting the cart before the horse. The reason why Twitter, and Reddit in particular work so well is because of sub-communities that form organically. More importantly, discovery was part of the value in using it. It's why every Mastodon community specific to one niche/subject is not very interesting, people are not one single interest, we follow someone we like for one reason, maybe it's they make cool art, then we find out they also make music too, then bam, you discover a new genre of music and the community around it. Decentralisation actively introduces friction into the most rewarding loop of the entire thing. Centralisation isn't the problem, it's just comorbid with shitty governance.
I bet on ATProto the last year, I've left this year. The network has been shrinking and the Bluesky leadership has been misleading about "user" numbers and hiding that they took private equity money. The atmo fund looks like a bunch of self dealing. I no longer trust any of them.
This year, I'm betting less social media as being better and in the long-run a new protocol that learns from the mistakes.
152 comments
> Social media was supposed to connect us, but most of it has turned into ads, division, and loneliness. I'm betting on ATProto as a way to fix that
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.
> If there's a healthy future for socializing on the internet, I think it will happen in small communities.
Bingo. Not a big (or even a small) user of social media. But small, focused communities are where I see it bring the most value for the user.
They are also where I've seen the most interesting initiatives since the 90s. The rest is just influential "people" broadcasting their content.
> 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.
Larry Wall said, way back in the 1990ies,
"The social dynamics of the net are a direct consequence of the fact that nobody has yet developed a Remote Strangulation Protocol."
Which is kind of correlated to the fact that being behind a keyboard feels different to people than being face to face.
We can either use our real names (bad plan IMHO) or deal with the fact that without the consequences of our actions, there are a lot of arseholes around.
Moderation is the answer, I think there's no way around that. HN show's that it can be done well, reddit show's that it can be done badly. Twitter show's what happens when it's not done (yes I'm being a little extreme there).
> "The social dynamics of the net are a direct consequence of the fact that nobody has yet developed a Remote Strangulation Protocol."
Every single day of my life in the past 25 years, whenever I interact with any people online, I have been thinking of this quote:
https://bash-org-archive.com/?4281
This is the ultimate, unsolvable problem of the Internet. In the real world, being an asshat very quickly leads to being punched in the face.
> 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.
I think that is why I still trust Mastodon/ActivityPub a lot more than Bluesky/ATProto. Mastodon at least provides the tools for small communities. Big instances still exist. Pile ons and drive-bys are still possible. But also Mastodon has plenty of small instances including many one-person instances. Even out of the box small instances are smaller overall traffic among the great river of ActivityPub. But also forks like Hometown exist for adding extra, simple "picket fences" around small communities. A "complete" view of ActivityPub is intentionally hard to get. By comparison, ATProto seems to me overfocused on the Relay system as a grand centralizing data bus and missing pieces of a conversation seen as much more of a bug rather than a feature (of ActivityPub).
I also think the future is healthier in the hands of smaller communities. I can teach someone how to effectively use Mastodon for small communities across an almost nice spectrum of "insular" with useful options on both sides from strangers tolerated to strangers mostly unwelcome (though that starts to lead away from Mastodon and back towards classic forum software). I don't see how to do anything like that with Bluesky and a lot of the design decisions of ATProto seem intentionally to try to avoid small communities.
If you are in any small communities using social platforms like Discord/Signal (chat rooms) or Discourse (forum), it's a very different feel. Most are genuinely positive experiences.
I suppose it depends on how one defines social media. My definitions are more flexible than they used to be.
[1] https://dholms.leaflet.pub/3mhj6bcqats2o
Mastodon/ActivityPub has a lot more to offer than mastodon.social but getting to that also means leaving the Twitter look and feel and folks realising they don’t have to follow trends set for them by influencers and big VC funded operations. If it’s really a social experience, it should have a people-first focus.
And it really is not about protocols - at the end of the day, email and RSS can also form a social network.
> instant communication between random strangers about random topics
Yes, but it requires both parts. HN works fine between random strangers, and random topics work fine with people you know. Its the combination that is toxic.
> Some of the most toxic conversations I've seen were on Mastodon
I second this. Even moderation of mastodon.social and related OSS projects is toxic. It was the biggest disappointment of the last couple of years to me, even worse than Twitter ever had been.
IMO there's huge value, these are amazing connective spaces. The sheer rank pitiful nihilism of these grievance-only walk-away shut-down views is totally unacceptable, is unhelpful in extreme, is not going to move things along in any useful way, and we need to figure out how to actually improve broadly, socially.
I can't stand that such energy drain vampire viewpoints get upvoted so consistently. Stop sucking all the energy from the room, stop draining those who want to try, especially as you use the medium you are also decrying as garbage, and log off and don't post at all. We don't deserve to be continually undermined by sucking empty try-nothing dont-care nihilism.
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.