[ericjmorey]

Its fundamental design lacks the ability to provide features that many people want, because the developers see those features as anti-features to be avoided.

Bluesky's AT Protocol was developed specifically to address what they saw as shortcomings with the ActivityPub protocol used by Mastodon and other similar services.

[Zak]

It's fundamentally reasonably capable of things like full text search and better discovery, which its lead dev and much of the community see as anti-features. There has been some recent progress on search, but being searchable is opt-in only because many users are opposed to search.

I think decisions like that are an active choice not to become popular.

[vidarh]

My impression from conversations here is that the AT protocol largely came from the developers being unaware of how they could've achieved the same thing with no or minimal extensions to ActivityPub. There may or may not be actual benefits to the protocol, but they could have achieved a far smaller delta and largely kept interoperability without any major sacrifices.