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AP is a standard for letting servers communicate, while ATP is that and more. You could build what ATP does on top of AP, or make both compatible. What matters is really the communities and ecosystems behind these protocols.
AP is behind the Fediverse. The basic building block of the Fediverse is the instance. Every instance is its own self-contained, centralized social media service, that optionally federates with other instances via ActivityPub. There is nothing about AP that encourages decentralization. To the contrary, the way things work rn encourages centralization (but that's pretty technical).
Case in point, Trump's Truth Social is a Mastodon instance that choses not to federate. If it was open for federation, the Fediverse would look quite different. Or perhaps more likely, most other instances would choose to defederate.
I explain this because a few weeks ago, there were some posts pitching the Fediverse as decentralized social media. But the Fediverse is what it is because the people running the servers choose to do things a certain way. This is not a result of technical or legal features.
@Proto is the result of a project to make Twitter decentralized. That is, not a decentralized alternative, but actual Twitter with all its users. We might never have heard much about it if Musk had not taken the wrecking ball to Twitter. The team created Bluesky as a proof of concept.
Current social media companies have monopoly power over their users. @Proto seeks to structure social media in such a way that that is impossible. It is quite sophisticated. Improvements may be possible, but it certainly is good enough to solve the technical aspect of social media monopolies. Of course, the technical part was never the hard part. We will see if the economics work out. But the real challenge is the legal angle.
I mostly agree with your comment, but want to nitpick about this part:
This one is something I must disagree with. I'm using the instances (servers) I am precisely because the people running those servers choose to do things in a certain way. If they did them in a different way, I would be on a different server. In the Fediverse it is extremely easy to vote with your feet. The admins have very free reign over their instances, but that doesn't mean that they have a free reign over the users of their instances.
Yeah it really only takes me an hour to setup a new account to my liking, easier now with piefed.
It does take a while to join all the communities you were subscribed to from your old instance, but I don't think it took close to an hour. Of course, my new instance accepting my application did take its time. And I think that was several hours. But still: You give a few details today and continue tomorrow by subscribing to a bunch of communities.
You can import your subscription list from a previous account, be it Lemmy or Piefed
The Fediverse is fine as it is. But some people hope that it is the future of social media which isn't likely at all.
The Fediverse is called decentralized because no one instance has a majority of users. But the only way to make sure that this state continues is if the most popular instances close registration for new users. That's an easy choice to make for the volunteers running instances. More users mean more expense and more work. That's what I mean by choices. A growth-oriented company would not do that.
I don't see what's so special about being able to make new accounts. You can do that anywhere. What you can't do is take your followers, communities, or posting history with you. For many people, that is not acceptable, and not just influencers, for whom their accounts are their business capital. That's a big part of what enables social media monopolies.
I don't see how the Fediverse solves any of the problems with social media. The hobbyist driven Fediverse isn't going to take off. Any professional, growth-oriented instance would have all the familiar problems.