this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2025
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The Technological Poison Pill: How ATProtocol Encourages Competition, Resists Evil Billionaires, Lock-In & Enshittification (www.techdirt.com)
submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/technology
19 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

There’s been some debate over the last year or so regarding Bluesky and how decentralized it really is. There has also been a growing fear that “enshittification is inevitable.” Or, worse, that an “evil billionaire” might take it over and ruin it the way other platforms have been ruined.

But I think it’s important to understand that Bluesky has, effectively, created a technological poison pill: by building on an open protocol, ATprotocol, the system itself can be rebuilt outside of Bluesky, but in a way where everyone can continue to communicate, and that creates incredible incentives that undermine any evil billionaires, and would actually punish Bluesky (or anyone else!) should they try to enshittify.

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[–] [email protected] 57 points 2 weeks ago (6 children)

But I think it’s important to understand that Bluesky has, effectively, created a technological poison pill: by building on an open protocol, ATprotocol, the system itself can be rebuilt outside of Bluesky, but in a way where everyone can continue to communicate, and that creates incredible incentives that undermine any evil billionaires, and would actually punish Bluesky (or anyone else!) should they try to enshittify.

Bruh, ActivityPub is right there, and we already have places where people can communicate. And it's already built in such a way that anyone can make use of it. Currently not so with ATprotocol.

When BlueSky has interoperable servers that anyone can spin up, then this conversation is worth having, but if the protocol at all requires "the next person" to have tons of investment capital to get things running again, it's still just a billionaire-buyout away.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

To be fair ActivityPub is a pretty shitty protocol in terms of scaling up with all the quadratic communication and caching growth it requires. Not that ATprotocol is better, just that there is room for improvement on ActivityPub before it could be used on a world-wide scale for the entire human population the way major social media sites are right now.

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