If you were to design an open social networking protocol, what would that look like? Which metaphors and comparisons would you use to get a general idea of how the network functions? And what would you answer if people ask if your network is decentralised and federated?
So Nostr actually compares favorably to both since I don't even know which servers send out by messages to everyone. Also, every single one is IP banned in China alley
How applicable the concepts of decentralisation and federation are to the ATmosphere is debatable, but they are used as an approximation for the core question: how is power distributed in the network? And Bluesky and the ATmosphere make it clear that technological architecture can only help so much here: Sure, you can be completely independent of Bluesky PBC on the ATmosphere, as everything is open. But in the end, 99% of users are exclusively on infrastructure owned by Bluesky PBC. No technological architecture can compensate for that kind of the power distribution.
But IMO, from the point of view of interoperability, it was bad enough having competing corporate social networks. We don't want to replace that with competing open meta-networks. And yet ActivityPub and ATProto seem to use completely different paradigms, which would make bridging them pretty hard. Frustrating.