There are no instances in ATProto

If Mastodon.social disappeared tomorrow, aren't everyone's accounts on that instance effectively just gone?

> If I am fully self-hosting the entire bluesky app, I need to spend ten thousands of dollars a month, but it'll keep working.

That strikes me as a point in favor of AtProto for decentralization (unless it's possible for others to cheaply/simply run their own backups of the entire mastodon.social instance & I'm just unaware of that fact).

> With bluesky it's different.

The key AtProto differentiator I find most compelling (which it seems you omitted from your list) is that Bluesky can disappear tomorrow and, if I'm running my own PDS, I can simply log in to another different platform using my same username & account and immediately see my entire message history w/o skipping a beat.

From the standpoint of an individual user who just wants to own their own data w/o needing to worry about hosting entire apps or manage scaling, the fact that AtProto allows me to host a PDS and do just that while still using any of big-name apps w/o needing to create new logins and fracture my online presence feels like a far more pragmatic trade-off, IMO.

I guess it comes down whether you care more about data decentralization, or platform decentralization. Personally, I care far more about the former, and to that end the AtProto model feels much easier to set up & far more seamless in practice.

> On a Mastodon instance, there are also no steps you can take. Your account is banned on the instance — your entire identity goes down with it.

> On atproto, it depend on whether you’re banned at hosting or app level.

> If you get banned at hosting level (usually something clearly illegal would trigger this), you’d have to find another hosting (assuming apps haven’t banned you too).

This isn't as different as you make it sound. Most people on AT Proto are using Bluesky, so "getting banned" is fundamentally the same for them as getting banned from a Mastodon instance. Conversely, you can just run your own Mastodon instance and the only thing you'd have to worry about is defederation (an "appview ban").

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.

As a (kinda former, as the project is mostly inactive now) diaspora contributor who followed closely the creation of the first decentralized social network (with GNUStatus and Friendica), I'm really interested about this explanation, but it asks more question than it explains. First of all, why did we move away from blog with RSS with app readers? (We did not fully abandoned that by the way, there are still some excellent RSS aggregators out there such as https://flus.io) Because Facebook not only it allowed us to react / comment on what we were reading, it also allowed us to follow the reactions of others. The principle behind social network is that you don't follow a website author and so you know when they post, like RSS does, but you follow an account, and so you know every reactions they do. Imagine being informed when someone that you find interesting is commenting on a blog you did not even know it existed? And who themselves are following, so probably you should follow those people too, and discover even more blogs with interesting content! There were technics to try to do that with blogs back in the days. Planets (public blog aggregators) to read linked content, pingback to know when your blog post is quoted somewhere, etc. But none of this was easy, efficient and complete as Facebook was. So everyone migrated there, because it made content discoverable, which means visibility, which exactly why we are publishing on the web. But Facebook is centralized. This is a big flaw, we don't want to depend on a corporation to publish online. And so, here come decentralized social networks. I am not going to describe the Federation (the diaspora protocol) here as the comment is already way too long, but it does allow what I described above, at the cost of having an identity tight to an instance (fla@diaspora-fr.org), but from which I can easily migrate. Now, after reading this article on ATProto, it is not clear at all to me how all those interactions described above are implemented. Could you elaborate?

> Twitter became a global phenomenon with the same UI and an even slower ruby on rails implementation behind it, despite the constant fail whale.

I’m not sure what this comment is responding to. I don’t want a constant fail whale or a slow experience, and I don’t think a lot of other people would want that either.

> As you're already self-hosting ATproto anyway, why not self-host a mastodon instance as well?

Hosting a PDS is free, plus it’s considerably lighter weight conceptually than a whole Mastodon instance!