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I don't want to spark a flame war, but it would be interesting to have a technical document that at least tries to objectively compare the two protocols (ActivityPub vs. ATProtocol). When I see Bluesky people attacking ActivityPub I don't know how to respond.

Or perhaps there is such a document that someone could recommend?

@galaxy_map Emily Hunt's replies to that toot are on the mark. It's a question of priorities, but activitypub means that users have to bet on their chosen host surviving long term for everything. But in practice, they don't last and the protocol design makes switching providers difficult (from the migration process not preserving toots, to relying on the host remaining reachable to actually migrate users).

There are real risks with atproto, sure, and its governance is one of them, but for my money it's the one I'm betting on long term because ultimately, it's hard to hope that the instance I picked will still be running in two, three, five years.

@cjshearwood @galaxy_map

Just operate your own instance.

Possibly with #ActivityPub.

Not really possible with #ATproto.

@nick @galaxy_map I mean, your average social media user doesn't have the vocabulary to even start thinking about running their own instance. I'm a professional software developer, with friends and contacts who do/have previously run their own instances and the overwhelming consensus is that social issues aside (like knowing to defederate the nazi, porn and abuse instances) it's not a great technical solution either. And frankly I don't want to spent my limited time on earth managing another server when I could be spending it doing something I actually enjoy.

@cjshearwood @galaxy_map

Then just decide for a well-known #Fediverse instance, that already operates for years...

@nick @cjshearwood @galaxy_map Someone starting out, say from migrating from X/Twitter wouldn't even know that that's something they should do.

@cjshearwood Huh. Interesting perspective.

I do get the impression that people who have had trouble with Mastodon often chose smaller unstable instances.

When I set up here a few years back I chose the main mastodon.social instance and I have never regretted it.

Reliable and updated regularly.

@galaxy_map I think that is a fair assessment, but it's not just the instance you choose, but the instances the people you follow choose. My timeline got a lot quieter when warhammer.social closed its doors, for instance.

And at least in my case, I specifically chose an instance with friendly moderation policies, run by people I felt I could trust. This is, according to my fedi-evangalising friends, intended to be a key selling point (and one I broadly agree with), but equally it's not financially sustainable and one day the guy running it is going to decide "it's been fun" and turn it off.

Would I have a different opinion had I gone with the "official" instance? Maybe, but equally, it's not like it's easy to change that now.

(I am just a little glad business cards don't really exist any more, otherwise I'd be even more mad about it if I now had to reprint them all)

@cjshearwood
The last time I was at a business conference, everyone was still giving out business cards. I'm in Europe.

My business cards now link to my contact page: kevinjardine.dev/contact, which I can update as needed.

kevinjardine.devContact MeHire me!

@cjshearwood @galaxy_map

There's no problem in principle with fixing those problems. The reason they have not yet been is as far as I can tell at least in part that unravelling the social effects is hard, and Mastodon in particular tend to favour moving slow in those instances.

There's nothing in principle preventing a new instance from supporting importing an export of your toots. In practice it's a question of how trustworthy you want the history to be.

@vidar @galaxy_map there is a problem that fediverse clients tend to be bad at acknowleding past-dated posts (which could also be fixed), but the last time I saw this conversation it emerged that a lot of the big players are averse to it, partly because of a desire for toots to be ephmeral.

Honestly I think this is bad, but also functionally it's already the case: the length of time a given toot is accessible to you is already down to your instance maintainers, and images may as well die in a matter of weeks on small instances.

Buuuut there's an awful lot of things that could be fixed, and in the last few years it feels like bsky/atproto is more interested in actually fixing them, where mastodon is in many places hamstrung by (obvious in retrospect but in some cases impossible to have known at the time) flaws or restrictions in activitypub.

@cjshearwood @galaxy_map

I don't think fixing any of the issues without ditching ActivityPub is a problem, but it won't necessarily be Mastodon that does it. From my perspective I think you need to look at this as a long slog, where a lot of these ideas will erode as people accept that they can't actually control it. E.g. they may wish toots to ephemeral, but nothing stops people crawling them, so they won't be. Same thing w/search, algo's etc.