It's also effectively centralized. Of course that makes the experience easier.

If you cannot reach UX that normal people will use, you're building for the very few

tradeoffs are acceptable to help our social fabric to take a step in a better direction and away from corporate silos and the attention economy

Except that usernames contain a domain name component, and the “bare” username likely isn’t globally unique, the UX is nearly the same as other microblogs. And as to that username bit, people are used to joe@gmail.com and joe@outlook.com being different people, and having to specify which one they’re trying to send an email to.

Everyone who’s both email and Twitter already understands all the basic concepts.

> And as to that username bit, people are used to joe@gmail.com and joe@outlook.com being different people, and having to specify which one they’re trying to send an email to.

User handles are unique in ATProto because of the domain, just like email. Not sure what the "except" part is about. Can you clarify? In ATProto, they are not "bare"

ActivityPub is the same, except they are tied to the server you join. In ATProto, they are decoupled from your data host so you can move your data and server without changing your handle. You can also change your handle without moving anything else, because handle points to a DID behind the scenes

Ah, to be clear, I was thinking of ActivityPub.

How’s ATProto work for the 99.9% of people who don’t own domains?

You just get a *.bsky.social handle.

The thing I really don't love about ATProto is its decision, or that of its dominant implementation to enforce a schema ("lexicon") on content, limiting interoperation between disparate software. This violates the Old Internet idea of software being liberal about what it accepts.

For a concrete example, I tagged a Lemmy community in a Mastodon post today. Lemmy is Reddit-like and Mastodon is Twitter-like, but it displays reasonable on Lemmy using the first line of the post as a title and expanding to the attached image when clicked in the default Lemmy UI. I can also post a long-form article on Wordpress (with a plugin) and have it show up in Mastodon even though it has a short character limit by default.

That's an incorrect assessment

Lexicon schema are not enforced, they are a tool for social coordination, and most implementations are very liberal in what they accept

https://www.pfrazee.com/blog/lexicon-guidance

> isTool: true; isRule: false; meaning: undefined

ActivityPub by contrast lacks such social coordination and many apps are reusing the same schema for very different concepts, leading to its own form of over-complexity

how do you measure "too complicted"?

Didn't measure what complicated means, these are the words people who churned use

Generally the first point is server selection. That's too complicated for most users

Somehow I doubt it is.

People are capable of selecting phones, phone network providers, e-mail providers, Internet providers, but selecting a server for mastodon is too complicated?

Don't buy it

> Don't buy it

Not listening to users is when learning stops

You are making bad analogies, instead compare AP to other social media networks and what users expect when signing up

> You are making bad analogies, instead compare AP to other social media networks and what users expect when signing up

I don't. I make these analogies, because they show that almost everyone is able to deal with the complexity of selecting a service provider.

I acknowledge that it is not their expected sign up flow, though, because they you can only expect what you already know.

That’s actually why I never tried it. Server selection. Choice paralysis. Gave up.

how did you get internet access?

Usually there's a couple of options for internet access based on your address, not hundreds of servers.

Yeah one choice for me, the local cable company.

But for mastodon, even if it technically "doesn't matter" nobody stops there. You see things written like "The hardest part of getting started on Mastodon is the first step,"[1]

They talk about chosing a server based on region, language, topics of interest, or which ones your friends use. I've even some mention that your server choice can signal your political leanings.

I don't worry about any of those things when I choose an email provider or ISP.

[1] https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/how-to-pick-a-mastodon-server