Here's another article answering this question: https://overreacted.io/open-social/. The one you're commenting on links to it in the first paragraph with "if not, read this!" for that exact reason--I can't explain the motivation and technical details in the same post, or to repeat the same explanation from post to post.
I read this article the other day and I am not sure what the breakthrough is with AT/bsky. It seems like the functionality "This blurs the boundaries between apps. Every open social app can use, remix, link to, and riff on data from every other open social app." is already provided on the web through hyperlinks.
There is seemingly nothing in the AT protocol that prevents sites from defederating and enabling vendor lock-in, just like how every other social media site has switched to requiring you to log in to see links.
There is seemingly nothing usefully decentralized about it. There is some sort of psuedo-distribution where you can host on your own domain. But like email, I imagine these types of users will be effectively blocked due to spam filtering.
It's like P2P if it was invented by people who know nothing about P2P, but just want to create a version of twitter that is immune to the company being bought out by someone they don't like and instituting a different censorship regime.
Yeah except there’s no guarantee of structured data there! With AT, each record is specified using a corresponding lexicon—making for much more straightforward interop.
> There is seemingly nothing in the AT protocol that prevents sites from defederating and enabling vendor lock-in, just like how every other social media site has switched to requiring you to log in to see links.
And that’s fine! Any site can choose to do whatever they please—but the underlying AT records always remain accessible to other consumers (apps, users, …).
> I imagine these types of users will be effectively blocked due to spam filtering.
Blocked by whom? If the relay (which pulls records from your PDS) “blocks” your PDS, you can simply switch to one that doesn’t. The beauty of AT infra is every piece of it can be run separately. That’s “meaningful” decentralization.
>Blocked by whom? If the relay (which pulls records from your PDS) “blocks” your PDS, you can simply switch to one that doesn’t.
Blocked by pretty much everyone, in the case of email. If most people use gmail or hotmail, and these mail providers block mail from new domains regardless of DMARC/DKIM/etc. then you are effectively blocked from sending email to most people. It's inevitable that this happens because there is no sybil resistance built in to the network layer, so providers have to be blocky to prevent spam.
> The beauty of AT infra is every piece of it can be run separately. That’s “meaningful” decentralization.
So kind of like how in the web, every website can be run separately?
You can switch, but everyone else won't coordinate to switch at the same time. So you have been deplatformed. It is the same with the web, where if you get banned from a forum (perhaps one that changes its rules to suit sponsors), you can switch to using a forum that no one uses due to network effects.
>There is seemingly nothing in the AT protocol that prevents sites from defederating and enabling vendor lock-in, just like how every other social media site has switched to requiring you to log in to see links.
Note there is no "federation" in the Mastodon sense; sites don't "talk to" each other. They just all aggregate data from the web. Yes, an app doing that could potentially stop "posting to" and "aggregating from" the web in the future and move the source of truth to a local database. But by doing that, it mostly just loses interoperability--and someone else could start a new app with the already existing data on the network, effectively forking their product with its users/data.
>It's like P2P if it was invented by people who know nothing about P2P
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