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."
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..