ActivityPub and ATProto both promise to rebuild social life online, but they answer the question of where community actually forms in fundamentally different ways. Protocol design is institutional design, and right now those institutions are being built.
This article is better than most like this in that it at least acknowledges the existence of the threadiverse and even explores some of it’s community-related features. Hurrah! But really it equates ActivityPub with just Mastodon, which leads to the conclusion it does. I believe that if they compared Lemmy/PF’s ActivtyPub with ATProto the conclusion might have been quite different.
(Community lives in the heads of the people involved and their feelings of connection to and support for one another. But ok, let’s run with the assumption it’s a technology / protocol thing…)