This post is a blogpost version of a recent talk that Daniel Holmgren gave at AtmosphereConf (March 2025).

AT Protocol (or atproto) is a protocol for creating decentralized social applications.

It's not the first protocol with that aim to exist. In the history of decentralized social media protocols, atproto takes a unique approach which is still deeply influenced by technologies and movements that came before it.

The phrase “atproto ethos” often comes up during our protocol design discussions. It's a fuzzy term, but we use it to refer to the philosophical and aesthetic principles that underlie the design of the network.

In this post, we'll distill that ethos. First, we look at the movements in technology that have most directly influenced atproto.Then, we pull out the core innovations that atproto brought to the table. Finally, we highlight some opinionated ways of thinking that influenced the design.

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[–] ElectroVagrant@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

Hey wait a minute...

Opinionated Takes
[...]
While there's something empowering about the idea of being able to do anything, it's also easy for this to fall into the tyranny of structurelessness - a collapse in coordination that prevents anything from actually getting done. Without structure in the network, energy that could go into novel development gets redirected into facilitating interoperation, fixing edgecases between implementations, building up defenses to bad actors or security issues from other parties, and trying to coordinate evolution without a clear leader.

What's unfortunate is this applies very broadly to any loosely defined standard/protocol, so it's not specifically a critique of ActivityPub, but it's also not not a critique of ActivityPub either.