[Email letting any server send to another with no authentication enabled universal messaging, spam, and becoming the defacto internet identity, for which its spec wasn't designed nor does it anticipate. HTTP model with servers authoritative for their resources enabled the web's openness and also consolidation into a few platforms. RSS gave publishers independant distribution but with no way to collectively curate, so algorithmic platforms filled the void. Google defeated XMPP simply by not federating when its own network had enough users so that protocol no longer served its interests.]
[Protocols can design the rules but not how the actors operate within them. Silence about purpose is a politics of non-interference that predictably benefits actors with resources to build wherever the protocols did not govern.]
if we define ATProto’s purpose by what it currently does, the answer is not “a decentralized social protocol with separated powers” but “a social protocol with architectural provisions for decentralization, currently operated as a near-centralized system.” Whether those architectural provisions will translate into actual distribution of power depends on economic and institutional developments that no amount of protocol design can guarantee.
The open protocol community has inherited two intellectual traditions, both inadequate to this problem: an engineering functionalism that treats protocols as neutral infrastructure whose political consequences are someone else’s concern, and a governance minimalism that treats any collective decision-making structure as a potential vector for the very centralization the protocols were designed to prevent. The result is a community that has developed exceptional sophistication about technical architecture and individual rights while remaining largely inarticulate about collective governance. Addressing this will require the protocol design community to draw on intellectual traditions it has not yet seriously engaged with, including Ostrom’s institutional analysis, Beer’s organizational cybernetics, and the broader literature on commons governance and cooperative design.
the same incentive structures that determine who can afford to operate at scale also determine what content those operators are rewarded for surfacing.
"Purpose not being defined gets captured by well-resourced actors" reminds me of Kyla Scan's "friction doesn't get removed, just shifted" and Rudy Fraser's "you can't design decentralized software without thinking about moderation". Purpose and consideration of the dynamics created by interfaces and systems perhaps should be part of the design process.
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