>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.
>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.