I’d push back a bit on the claim that atproto features, particularly decoupling identity from the topology of federation, could have been done as extensions to ActivityPub. It’s a fundamental part of the way information flows in ActivityPub vs atproto.
I tried Mastodon for a bit and like the community there, but I found they were very deliberately trying to build a place that wasn’t like twitter: building federated search is frowned-upon; no quote-tweets; extremely low threshold for content warnings.
They’re building something different and that’s great, but it’s no surprise that people fleeing twitter want to go to the more twitter-like app.
I tried Mastodon for a bit and like the community there, but I found they were very deliberately trying to build a place that wasn’t like twitter: building federated search is frowned-upon; no quote-tweets; extremely low threshold for content warnings.
They’re building something different and that’s great, but it’s no surprise that people fleeing twitter want to go to the more twitter-like app.