[bjt]

I like the future that the ATProto evangelists are painting. I would love for it to happen. But I am skeptical that a protocol is going to solve an incentive problem.

In the beginning Twitter was very free and open with API access. There were plenty of alternative apps. Of course, that changed when they got serious about monetizing.

Would it really be any harder for Bluesky to switch from ATProto to a proprietary API than it was for Twitter to close their API? How many users are realistically going to download their archives and upload them to some other provider? If most people are using the website or official app, that's where the stickiness is. There would be a blog post with a title like "Supporting the Bluesky Community for the Next Century" and how it's better to have a centralized site that can feed its employees than an idealistic decentralized one that disappears. Things would seem OK at first. But enough years of chasing quarterly KPIs would put them in the same spot as Twitter and Facebook.

[skybrian]

The Bluesky API's are much more open than the Twitter API's ever were. There are people building alternate implementations of the entire stack. The alternatives don't have many users (maybe a few hundred to a few thousand), but the infrastructure is pretty far along.

[jimbokun]

About the same number as would fork an open source project.

So not very many. But the possibility of doing so is invaluable.

[verdverm]

The phrase "hard fork" has come up before in the ecosystem, and outside of it with others who've stepped back and watch to see how things unfold.