Connected Places

@fediversereport.com

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Connected Places gives you an in-depth overview of the world of decentralised social networks. I write a weekly newsletter about the ATmosphere, a […] 🌉 bridged from https://mastodon.social/@fediversereport on the fediverse by https://fed.brid.gy/

Jasseem Allybokus Jasseem Allybokus • 2e Co-founder & CEO @eYou — The social media you can trust. Mijn website bezoeken 2 d • Bewerkt • A lot of you have been asking us the same question. "Why isn't eYou built on the AT Protocol?" I owe you a real answer. And today, I'll give you two. Because we've also just shipped something: you can now sign in to eYou with your Bluesky identity. It's live. People are using it. Let me explain both. First. Why we didn't build on AT Protocol. AT Protocol is impressive engineering. Real respect for the team behind it. But look closely at how it works, and at what European law requires of us. 1. The firehose. The moment you post, relays crawl your PDS and store full copies of your data. A public stream called the firehose broadcasts every post, like, and follow. It requires no authentication. Anyone can subscribe, capture, archive, and republish. Forever. 2. The right to erasure (GDPR Article 17). When you delete on AT Protocol, your PDS removes its copy. But the firehose has already broadcast it. Relays hold their own copies. Scrapers have indexed it. The protocol provides no mechanism to force them to delete. Erasure becomes a polite request, not a right. 3. The Russmedia ruling (CJEU, December 2025). This Grand Chamber decision (C-492/23) holds that platforms hosting user content qualify as joint data controllers under GDPR, with preventive obligations before publication. It also confirms that the Digital Services Act safe harbor does not displace GDPR. Applied to AT Protocol, where Relays and AppViews actively ingest and index user data, this creates a serious compliance problem. Preventing third-party copying of personal data is exactly what federation is designed not to do. 4. The did:plc identifier. AT Protocol's default identity method relies on a cryptographically chained, append-only operation log, operated as a central directory by a single US-based company. Erasing entries breaks the chain's integrity. Article 17 requires full erasure to be possible.
The reason decentralisation matters for something like age verification isn’t just “run your own server,” as Hodgson acknowledges that server admins are still subject to local law. It’s that when your social life isn’t bundled into one platform, no single company’s policy change can disrupt all of your communication, community, and content at once. What we’re finding is that for decentralisation to really make an impact, it needs to happen on multiple axes at the same time. There is the decentralisation in the way it is usually understood by communities on ActivityPub and Matrix: from a single centralised server to many decentralised servers run by independent groups. This gives communities autonomy over their own spaces, but each server still replicates the same software and feature set. There is the decentralisation in the way it is done on atproto: from a single software stack to separating identity, data storage and apps. This means your identity and data aren’t locked to any one application, and different apps can offer different experiences on top of the same underlying infrastructure.
The implicit theory behind the open social web was that platform quality would determine outcomes. Build something that’s better, and in combination with the incumbent getting worse, this would lead to such difference in quality, user experience and safety that at some point people would switch from X to alternatives like Mastodon or Bluesky. This theory held up for a while in 2023 and 2024. In 2025 it started to falter, as Musk aligned himself with Trump, the signup waves to the alternative platforms effectively stopped. In early 2026, this theory is now really over, because X has fundamentally changed. Mastodon and Bluesky are not in competition anymore with the platform X, because X has changed. It changed from being a platform to the power structure for the neo-royalty, with the public square shambling along as a zombie, animated by everyone who still treats X like it’s 2015. You cannot out-compete ‘where the ruling faction radicalizes and coordinates’ by having better moderation policies or algorithmic choice. X is not a platform problem anymore, it is a power problem, and building a different platform does not solve the power problem.
In a recent blog post, Mastodon calls for “social sovereignty”, as a response to how X can retaliate against government institutions. Mastodon understands social sovereignty here as public institutions taking control of their social media presence, mainly by running their own social networking servers on software like Mastodon. They mention explicitly that the EC already has their own Mastodon server, at ec.social-network.europa.eu, and invite other organisations to follow suit. That the EC already has their social sovereign presence, but only uses it for press releases without any of the Commissioners using the platform, further accentuates the large gap between the rhetoric and behaviour. Still, the infrastructure for alternative ways for the EC to take power already exists. Initiatives like Eurosky further indicate that the tools for the EC to shift power structures away from the platforms they’re trying to regulate are available.
a screenshot of the Traverse page, showing 2 link cards, with some commentary as well as the comments on Leaflet, posts on bluesky and saves on Semble
One criticism that often gets put at Bluesky from people within the fediverse is that it has not federated yet. I do not think that ‘federation’ is a helpful term to help understand ATProto actually works, see this article for more context. However, the interoperability between Bluesky and Wafrn does involve interoperability between servers over ATProto, making that Bluesky and Wafrn are federated in the way people on the fediverse understand the term federation. The fact that an app called “We Allow Female Representing Nipples” is what makes Bluesky federated is honestly extremely funny to me.
One of the main subjects of discussion recently has been whether Bluesky is decentralised and if it is federated. I think answering these questions requires a clarity on how ATProto differs conceptually from ActivityPub. Decentralisation and federation are valued for how they impact power structures, but there are multiple ways to build other power structures in open social networks. A bit of the summary at the top, since that might help during reading: The conceptual model of ActivityPub resembles that of email: independent servers sending messages to each other. The conceptual model of ATProto resembles that of the web: independent sites publish data, and indexers aggregate this data into different views and apps.
A short history of the name Farcaster: 1989: The Hyperion Cantos is a science fiction novel series from the 1990’s, in which a farcaster network allows instantaneous travel between different worlds. The farcaster network is build and maintained by an AI Civilization called the TechnoCore. In later books it is revealed the TechnoCore was planning to use the farcaster network to destroy humankind. 2020: 2 ex-Coinbase directors, Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan, start their own company, and start working on a product called RSS+. Late 2021: a viral tweet sets a new standard for naming tech products. Summer 2022: Romero and Srinivasan rebrand their product Farcaster, and announce a 30M funding around led by a16z. May 2024: Farcaster announces a 150 million USD investment with a valuation of 1 billion USD.