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.
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.
You’re not wrong, and if BlueSky is so allegedly “philanthropic” (according to them), it’s not like they couldn’t have put their efforts towards improving ActivityPub instead, which is already resisting centralization from the likes of Meta.
And if they weren’t allowed to do so, due to some rule governing investment capital or shareholders, etc., therein lies their problem.