Hey 👋 if you don't know us already, we're building Frontpage; an AT Procol based federated link aggregator. We shipped an initial MVP in closed beta recently and have since been thinking about the road to general availability.

This post is an RFC (Request for Comments) targeted at technically minded folks who are interested in seeing the progression of atproto for non-Bluesky/microblogging use cases. All that's to say the language that follows assumes some knowledge about how Bluesky and atproto work! I've tried to include links to explain what all of the jargon means though, so hopefully it's not entirely nonsense for folks a little less familiar!

When you post on Frontpage, we propose that a mirror post will also be created in your Bluesky account. When you comment on Frontpage, we propose that a mirror reply will be created in your Bluesky account.

Conversely, when you reply to one of these mirrored posts in Bluesky - we will show it as a reply in Frontpage.

Additionally, Bluesky likes will be translated to Frontpage votes and vice versa.

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[–] nate@social.trom.tf 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

@erlend_sh Cool to see things being built with AT. For what my thoughts are worth, I think that having Frontpage posts showing up on Bluesky would be benificial. It'd probably make it feel like it has a lower barrier to entry and increase interactions/discussions across the different communities.

P.S. replying here with Friendica which is taking advantage of similar cross compatibility.

Also, just a curiosity, how good is AT's cross compatibility without workarounds? Obviously if you guys are considering I assume it works, but I've been curious how well things play together. Nostr has NIPs to solve the issue, and ActivityPub is a little tempermental, but with AT's repo style accounts I've wondered how well everything interacts across different implementations.

[–] aasatru@kbin.earth 2 points 2 months ago

If I understand correctly, there's a central pump running behind the scenes in any AT implementation. You feed content into the central hub, and it pumps it out to everyone connected to it. Bluesky itself provides the one major pump that feeds its network right now.

So in that sense, Bluesky is a centralised network with decentralized users.

Frontpage is building a different pump, spreading different kind of content to a different type of platform. So there's no obvious connection between the Bluesky pump and the Frontpage pump - that's why they're talking about bridging in the post.

It almost seems a bit silly - in order for two AT hubs to talk, you need to build a bridge for them. At that point, you could might as well have built an AP protocol and made it work with Bridgy.fed.

Furthermore, all "instances" running Frontpage would process data through the same central hub. If that goes down or they run out of funding, it's all over.

I'm applauding the Frontpage crowd for trying something new. But I'm not entirely convinced I see the benefit compared to what we're doing over here.