Anything can restrict traffic. SMTP has no lock-in and you can use your own domain, but Gmail could decide to send all your email to spam.

Anything can just start ignoring traffic and not showing content.

I remember when Google Talk used XMPP federation. Lots of people ran XMPP servers. Then Google turned off federation and only Google Talk users could chat with other Google Talk users.

Unlike email, Bluesky essentially has one service. There's no culture of openness there. It wouldn't be hard for them to decide that they'd become the single service in the future. 99% of users aren't going to leave for a different provider and they could simply black hole stuff from other providers.

I'm not saying they want to do that, but saying there's no lock-in is wrong at this point. Bluesky could shut down their ATProto entirely and just close if off and 99.9%+ of users wouldn't notice a thing.

Bluesky can only be considered open once there are many other home servers and the Bluesky home server isn't the vast majority of traffic. Let's say it's 2025 and Bluesky has 500M users and there are 10 other servers with 5,000-500,000 users. Let's say one of the alternatives seems like it might be a threat to Bluesky's business model. Bluesky simply stops sending its posts via ATProto and then users on those other servers need to migrate to Bluesky. Total lock-in. Now, if it's 2025 and Bluesky has 50M users, ATProtoX has 100M users, SkyNet has 200M users, SocialSky has 25M users, etc., then it's hard to lock someone in. Bluesky couldn't cut itself off from 85% of the network. Bluesky could cut itself off from 0.001% of the network.

Just because Bluesky is using the ATProto today doesn't mean they'll continue to. As long as Bluesky is essentially 100% of the content/users/etc., it's easy for them to pivot away from openness toward lock-in. It's only open if they can't cut others off and as long as they're the source of almost everything on the ATProto, they can always pivot away. Yes, with the ATProto you can move servers. That doesn't mean Bluesky will continue to use ATProto and have openness around posting/viewing content.

the key thing though is that the data that people post with right now on Bluesky is on ATproto, which can be migrated to another PDS without permission from your current PDS (bsky.social). so if Bluesky tried to defederate you could take your data and fuck off with it to another PDS who supports ATproto and bam, Bluesky can't do anything about it.

the only thing keeping lock-in right now is the PLC directory, which I think has plans to be owned by consortium eventually.

That doesn't seem like a mitigation to what the poster above you said, to me. It just means that if I don't like it, I don't lose my posts when I move. That's nice but it offers no guarantees in the face of a corporate actor harming the overall federation of a network.

You and others in this thread aren't grokking what this means in practice: it means that users are transparently redirected to your new home wherever you are. If a corporate juggernaut tries to harm the network, folks just pick up and move their identity. The protocol bakes in treating the provider like a dumb pipe. The protocol puts the power in the hands of the users and at any time they can just up and walk away, defeating the stickiness of the provider.

No, I definitely get that. Where your data is, or is not, has no relevance to a network member choosing to behave badly or harmfully against that network. Nor does it actually impact what they can do to the network itself. It simply provides you with durability concerning your identity.

It is unrelated.

I’m not sure how your argument serves as any counter to “VCs invest in companies to make money” except that the shell game may be one deeper in this case.