Fucking Christ the @protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit I've ever looked at. It is complex solely for the sake of being complex and still suffers from *all* of the same problems as Mastodon.
Your server goes down? Sorry, all of your followers are lost. Account portability is no better than Mastodon. 'DIDs' serve literally no purpose. And none of the API code that Bluesky uses in their own app validates ANY of the crypto they're doing on the server. NONE OF IT.
I think the fundamental reason why we keep seeing more and more bullshit protocols and projects pop up like this is one fundamental mindset: a refusal to attribute the problems of the modern internet solely to capitalism.
The fact is that our protocols we have today generally work pretty great. The choice of protocols hasn't made the internet what it is today. It's the fact that unrestrained, late-stage neoliberal capitalism is reaching its logical conclusion: corporate control of commons.
There's a fundamental lack of trust in people with these protocols. That's exactly it.
Crypto assumes that everyone is an attacker and that nobody can be trusted, and so we need 'proof' of your actions.
Bluesky assumes the same, that you should have to prove that each social media post is yours cryptographically.
And the fact is just that that's not necessary. Mastodon's system works while requiring trust, and it scales remarkably well in an anticapitalist way.
@sam @davidgerard
I don't think that actually is the case. Its a fundamental misapplication of mistrust. The cryptocurrency world plays "hide the trust" not "eliminate the trust" all the time. And you can build systems where the bulk of things are untrusted but are fine to the user.
EG, your iPhone's cryptographic module doesn't even trust the base phone OS, which is why ApplePay is so great for payments as the security is very very top notch.
Sam 
Nicholas Weaver