| I'm interested in ATProto, but honestly this kind of "cheeky" post just turns me off. These are different approaches to the problem, they don't have to be adversarial. Another way to look at it: the Twitter-brained perspective is that it's a good thing to build a system where everyone has access to everyone else all of the time - that the global firehose is a primary goal. That notion is not universally agreed upon as desirable. Some folks and groups of folks value membranes with varying degrees of permeability. With Mastodon, each instance is a self-contained community server with the option to link up with peers of similar shape. That this arrangement makes a whole-world view difficult is seen as a feature-not-bug by many users. Also, since each instance is a self-contained complete unit of microblogging-shaped community, that means a relatively small technical team can host & maintain that unit for a decent-sized group of folks with relatively cheap cost. Put a bunch of those together in federation, and you have a chance at a pretty well-distributed spread of moderators and caretakers. Depending on how any particular instance's funding and governance is setup, that can also result in members being more or less involved in the running of the place. (Which, also, is why some folks value being "belonging" to a particular instance.) In ATProto, the "instance" is the complete stack you'd need to have ownership over the whole shebang. Some folks and communities value that. Versus Mastodon, Bluesky is just a much much bigger box. You can also separate Mastodon from ActivityPub. You can make new apps atop ActivityPub - and folks are. Photos, videos, calendars, etc. It's based on JSON Linked Data, and that's expandable to other types of activities and data. If you really wanted to, you could make a great big all-encompassing app UX that handles everything. But, I guess no one's found that interesting enough for it to take off yet. |