Mastodon is a non-profit with a handfull of engineers. How can you compare their resources to something like Bluesky or even Twitter, that has thousands of engineers, is beyond me.
Put another way, they were structured in a way that doesn't allow them to compete.
It’s understandable in ancient protocols like email where storage was at such a premium that universal replication was out and cryptography was primitive. It’s not forgivable today.
I am ignorant of AT — does it have this problem? I know that Nostr doesn’t and it’s always struck me as technically superior. Problem is there is nothing on there but Bitcoiners and all the topics adjacent to that subculture.
ATproto allows data to be hosted off-site but account lookup goes through the Bluesky owned centralized infra. Just my hunch but maybe its "federation" aims is just a sugarcoated version of "it's a carbon copy of late 2010s Twitter microservices, but we're building it on public IP with intentionally minimal authentication".
There is zero mechanism for the funding or promotion of anything that's not a lock-in play or a data play (or both).
I didn't realize Nostr had such scaling problems but I think it makes sense now that I consider how it's a client-server system with a network of servers. Making all traffic go through it that way is going to cause scaling issues or require scale-up of infrastructure that will break decentralization. AFAIK they intentionally passed on P2P because "it's hard," which is true, but it's also how you don't pay for bandwidth.
IPv6 has enough penetration now that you could probably get away with easy mode P2P where IPv6 is required. You still have to hole punch there but it works about 100% of the time because no port remapping. (Even the few areas where V6 NAT is deployed, it's usually 1:1 NAT without port remap.) If you don't have V6 you get a slower experience because you have to relay.
There's much more interesting innovation waiting for adoption on that lower part of the internet stack I suppose. As someone for whom that's a too specialist area I would love to have more overview of what are the promising technologies and upcoming standards to place early bets on.
The other day by accident I found out about Named Data Networking networking [0] via a paper [1] "Exploring the Design of Collaborative Applications via the Lens of NDN Workspace", and saw that NDN still sees active development after many years, so I wondered about the extent the technology still is considered promising for mass adoption today.
There is also DID:Web. This one has the downside that you need to continue to control the domain name in question indefinitely, and it can be argued that the domain name system is still a form of centralization. Like PLC users can theoretically change handles to another domain name with this scheme (but must contrinue to control the original domain name). Users can freely move to another personal data server.
AT Protocol can add new DID schemes in the future to avoid these downsides, with the caveat that users cannot change from DID type to a different one seamlessly, and adding new DID types may potentially require updates by multiple other parts of the ecosystem.
Mastodon has many MANY MANY issues.
The first is that instance operators regularly abuse their users as hostages in personal petty fights. I don't care too much about drama, but there has been a lot of it regarding Israel/Palestine or Ukraine/Russia and instances defederating from each other as a result of said drama.
The second one is instances can go down for whatever reason - the admins just being unable/unwilling to cope with moderation, running out of money, getting into trouble with the legal system, ... - and users can't move their post, DM and media history to another instance.
And the third one is it takes them forever to ship updates. Bluesky is so much faster moving when it comes to implementing new features, but Mastodon ships even slower than Twitter which is an "achievement" in itself.