This is such an important idea -- and yet I feel like the hyper-individualized "bluesky" implementation pictured is a less good practical idea than Mastodons more "server/host" way of doing things.
I get that theoretically the two should be similar or even identical in practice, but I feel like the way Bluesky goes so hard at "literally individuals maintain control over their own stuff" is kinda too hard for most, and that Mastodon's "just trust the server" way, which ABSOLUTELY has it's own problems, of course -- is still better, mostly because we have better practice in this style, in the form of good ol email.
>Social aggregation features like notifications, feeds, and search are non-negotiable in modern social products.
Conceptually, Mastodon is a bunch of copies of the same webapp emailing each other. There is no realtime global aggregation across the network so it can only offer a fragmented user experience. While some people might like it, it can't directly compete with closed social products because it doesn't have a full view of the network like they do.
The goal of atproto is enable real competition with closed social products for a broader set of products (e.g. Tangled is like GitHub on atproto, Leaflet is like Medium on atproto, and so on). Because it enables global aggregation, every atproto app has a consistent state of the world. There's no notion of "being on a different instance" and only seeing half the replies, or half the like counts, or other fragmentation artifacts as you have in Mastodon.
I don't think they're really comparable in scope, ambition, or performance characteristics.
Yeah, the goals of atproto are REALLY GOOD ones. The only thing I'm skeptical of is the extent to which "centralized state of the world" really needs to be a core of the protocol -- and does that sort of thing introduce the same kind of centralization that makes it vulnerable to enshittification?
My gut is that IT DOES. Put differently, there's presently nothing about TECH of the Mastodon model that prevents building tools that achieve similar "centralized everything" goals on top of Mastodon; only, you know, people and trust, the easiest part </sarcasm>.
Mastodon's probably the best long-term model and it's email that makes me think that.
In my view the atproto approach asks the users to make fewer required complex decisions, but gives them the freedom to make many voluntary ones. If someone wants to use a particular application, they basically just need to sign in. If they don't have an existing ATProto account, they can just make one, in the flow of the application they're signing into. Later they can chose different clients, or different infrastructure, or move their account, to their own hosting even if they want.
Mastodon requires a complex decision upfront, which server do I trust, which is analogous to where you create your account on ATProto, but unlike ATProto, doesn't give the tools to seamlessly transition later.
The trust lens I think is a good one. You want to let different users make different tradeoffs in effort without having that leading to a worse experience..
I mean, this might depend on who your intended audience is? As perhaps pie-in-the-sky my desire is, I'd like to see one of these things replace twitter (as opposed to smaller communities.)
And it seems to me that the more frictionless model is the one that looks like something people are used to; just "sign up with a thing."
That does leave the interconnection to the servers and others, but that may be how it has to be?
"Sign up with a thing" -- but then what about after that? You've made a bunch of stuff, what happens to it?
Offloading THAT mentally to a different "service" or "account" I think is easier than this all-in-one thing.
Again, I like the IDEA a lot; if you'd presented it to me like in 2000 before a lot of this stuff took off I would have been all about it.
Today? No, I think it's reasonable to offload that to so-and-so-dot-com, each as a separate account. Like the phrase "I have a facebook" always sounds weird to ME, but I think that's "the way."
They should be interoperable... I should be able to take my account from bluesky and host it on any other pub server
The server shouldn't need to be specific to mastodon/bluesky networks either
Ghost (the blogging platform) is kind of a peek into this — you can host your microblogging account there and interact with other activity pub networks like mastodon
this is the promise of the activitypub standard, anyone that uses the standard can interact with anyone else using the standard...
I get that theoretically the two should be similar or even identical in practice, but I feel like the way Bluesky goes so hard at "literally individuals maintain control over their own stuff" is kinda too hard for most, and that Mastodon's "just trust the server" way, which ABSOLUTELY has it's own problems, of course -- is still better, mostly because we have better practice in this style, in the form of good ol email.