@thisismissem But they *are* extremely representative of what is happening in the AT protocol space. It doesn’t matter if you like them or not. It doesn’t even matter whether they’re actually doing anything concrete or not (I suspect they aren’t).
From my perspective, supporting what FreeOurFeeds and Bluesky are doing is *exactly* what you’re asking us to support. Why would anyone even care about AT protocol if it weren’t for Bluesky?
@thisismissem Then I repeat my question: Why are freeourfeeds raising $30M to break the lock-in if there is no lock-in?
I’m not against people working on making AT protocol actually useful, but it so easily turns into an argument for “there are no problems with using Bluesky”. Why should I be positive about AT protocol when the only thing it does in practice is shit? Because that’s what you’re asking me to be (the “don’t argue” bit).
@thisismissem You are perfectly free to ignore my unrelated examples, I’m just providing my personal context for this.
The Bluesky relay is lock-in, since they require considerable resources to replicate if you want to interop with Bluesky. What else is the point of the $30M freeourfeeds campaign? Why raise $30M to break the lock-in if there is no lock-in?
@thisismissem Search for Blacksky on English Wikipedia. In the first 20 hits, only one is not about the Peter Thiel company, and that is about a Japanese race horse.
@thisismissem I sort of was in a similar situation (AFS) with a dominant implementation (Transarc, later OpenAFS), and our lesser known implementation (Arla), but Transarc never had anything like the lock-in effects Bluesky has. We were able to make things on a somewhat level playing field and interop just fine.
@thisismissem Hence my “in practice”. I’m not at all against people trying to do something with AT Protocol, but the proof is in the pudding.
The only thing that I see in my searches for Blacksky is a Peter Thiel project (guessing not the same). It doesn’t mean that small projects are bad, not at all, it means that a project that is obviously named after Bluesky is insignificant in comparison, and everything that mentions AT Protocol will have a relation to Bluesky, and be an excuse to use it.
@thisismissem But what if one of the protocols people are telling us is pro-open is in practice only used to build closed platforms. What conclusions should we draw then? If we keep throwing bananas into the cave and banana peels keep being thrown back out, then what?
