Disclaimer: i'm rather hostile to ATProto for reinventing the wheel without bringing much value over AP/XMPP/Matrix.
I don't think that's a fair characterization. Most AP implementations famously don't have privacy features: it was by design (and therefore no surprise to us tech folks), but i remember it was quite the scandal when users found out Mastodon instance admins could read users' private messages. A later "scandal" involved participation in the EUNOMIA research project about "provenance tracking" in federated networks [1], which to be fair to conspiracy theorists does sound like an academic front for NSA-style firehose R&D.
That being said, Bluesky is much harder to selfhost and is therefore not decentralized in practice. [2] See also Blacksky development notes. However, Bluesky does bring a very interesting piece to the puzzle which AP carefully ignored despite years of research in AP-adjacent protocols (such as Hubzilla): account portability.
All in all, i'm still siding on the ActivityPub ecosystem because i think it's much more ethical and friendly in all regards, and i'm really sad so many so-called journalists, researchers and leftists jumped ship to Bluesky just because the attraction of "Twitter reborn" (with the same startup nation vibes) was too strong. At least in my circles, i did not meet a single person who mentioned the choice of Bluesky was about UX or features.
But now, i'm slowly warming up to the ATmosphere having a vibrant development community. Much more so than AP. And to be fair to ATProto, it is worse than AP from a centralization standpoint, but at least it's not as bad and complex as the matrix protocol which brought 0 value over AP/XMPP but made implementations 100x more complex and resource-intensive.
> But now, i'm slowly warming up to the ATmosphere having a vibrant development community.
I build in the ATmosphere because I want to effect change. AP was hostile, Nostr is for crypto bros. The @dev community is one of the strongest pieces and attractors
One way I like to think about how the protocol is different is that they made a giant event system for the public content and then let anyone plug in anywhere they want
Even at the time Bill Clinton was already very much right-wing. When he was in power, he oversaw the destruction of public services and the introduction of neoliberalism. Is that not right-wing?
It's not just me saying this. Ask anyone who was politically active (as a leftist) in the 90s. I'm not sure what was the equivalent of the Democratic Socialists of America (center-left) at that time, but i'm sure there was an equivalent and Bill Clinton was much more right-wing. That's without mentioning actual left-wing parties (like communists, anarchists, black panthers etc).
Not a single of those three things is either left-wing or right-wing. It depends on the actual implementation.
For example, universal health-care is only left-wing if it's a public service. Taking money out of the State's pockets to finance private healthcare and pharmaceutical for-profit corporations is very much a definition of right-wing policy.
Everything depends on actual implementation. In healthcare, for example, we already had a system where state money was sent to private healthcare and pharmaceutical companies corporations. The problem was that the poorest people still had trouble getting covered. This proposal would have broadened the scope of who can afford that by providing poorer folks with direct government subsidies for coverage. Nobody is calling subsidize childcare in Scandinavian countries a "right-wing policy" because private providers exist.
Lowering military spending by aggressively shrinking active duty troop levels and eliminating weapons programs is certainly left-wing. Raising income taxes on the highest earners and raising the corporate tax rate have always been associated with left-wing policies in the US.
> de Gaulle would be considered insanely far right today
As much as it pains me to say this, because i myself consider de Gaulle to be a fascist in many regards, that's far from a majority opinion (disclaimer: i'm an anarchist).
I think de Gaulle was a classic right-wing authoritarian ruler. He had to take some social measures (which some may view as left-wing) because the workers at the end of WWII were very organized and had dozens of thousands of rifles, so such was the price of social peace.
He was right-wing because he was rather conservative, for private property/entrepreneurship and strongly anti-communist. Still, he had strong national planning for the economy, much State support for private industry (Elf, Areva, etc) and strong policing on the streets (see also, Service d'Action Civique for de Gaulle's fascist militias with long ties with historical nazism and secret services).
That being said, de Gaulle to my knowledge was not really known for racist fear-mongering or hate speech. The genocides he took part in (eg. against Algerian people) were very quiet and the official story line was that there was no story. That's in comparison with far-right people who already at the time, and still today, build an image of the ENEMY towards whom all hate and violence is necessary. See also Umberto Eco's Ur-fascism for characteristics of fascist regimes.
In that sense, and it really pains me to write this, but de Gaulle was much less far-right than today's Parti Socialiste, pretending to be left wing despite ruling with right-wing anti-social measures and inciting hatred towards french muslims and binationals.
While de Gaulle being far-right is not a majority opinion (except in some marginal circles), he would undoubtedly be considered far-right if he was governing today, which is what GP seems to have meant.
I think that, for most Western people today, far-right == bad to non-white people, independent of intention (as you demonstrated with your remark about the PS), so de Gaulle's approach to Algeria, whether he's loud about it or not, would qualify him as far-right already.
All this to say, the debate is based on differing definitions of far-right (for example you conflate fascism and far-right and use Eco, while GP and I seem to think it's about extremely authoritarian + capitalist), and has started from an ignorant comment by an idiot who considers Bush (someone who is responsible for the death of around a million Iraqis, the creation of actual torture camps, large-scale surveillance, etc.) not far-right because, I assume, he didn't say anything mean about African-Americans.
Believing in free speech is neither left nor right, it's on the freedom/authority axis which is perpendicular. Most people on the left never advocated to legalize libel, defamation, racist campaigns, although the minority that did still do today.
The "free-speechism" of the past you mention was about speaking truth to power, and this movement still exists on the left today, see for example support for Julian Assange, arrested journalists in France or Turkey, or outright murdered in Palestine.
When Elon Musk took over Twitter and promised free speech, he very soon actually banned accounts he disagreed with, especially leftists. Why free speech may be more and more perceived as right wing is because despite having outright criminal speech with criminal consequences (such as inciting violence against harmless individuals such as Mark Bray), billionaires have weaponized propaganda on a scale never seen before with their ownership of all the major media outlets and social media platforms, arguing it's a matter of free speech.
> police will just shoot them if they happen to feel like it.
Well that's exactly the problem. There's nothing stopping them: no accountability, no justice. Many cops just don't feel like randomly shooting people, and that's good. The problem is if they do, and even if they brag about it, little will be done.
Take for example the latest Sainte-Soline repression scandal revealed a few months back by Mediapart [1] where videos show dozens of riot cops making a contest about maiming the most people, encouraging one another to break engagement rules, and advocating for outright murder. Everybody knew before the bodycam videos, but now that we have official proof, we're still waiting for any kind of accountability.
If i go around and shoot people, there is no way i will avoid prison. If a cop goes around and shoots people, or strangles people to death, prison is a very unlikely outcome.
> you will never even meet someone who knows someone who was murdered by a cop
That's not how statistics work. Police abuse tends to happen in the same low-income social groups (and ethnic minorities). As an example, living in France, i've met several people who had a family member killed by police. Statistically unlikely if i only hung around in "startup nation" or "intellectual bourgeoisie" circles, which is not my case.
Being killed by police is different than being murdered by police.
Police in the US kill somewhere around 1000 people a year. But of those, it's something like 5-10 that are murders. There is maybe 1 every few years where the cop is itching to shoot someone who is clearly compliant and not a threat.
The 990 police killing videos that become available every year now are not particularly compelling, because its bad actors trying to kill police and getting themselves killed.
Sorry, I don't know anything about France and police though. The US has a different dynamic because guns are everywhere, especially where crime is. Every cop knows about the ~50 cops who are killed by guns every year.
The dynamic doesn't look very different here, at least from reading the news. I don't know about the US (though i suspect <1% murder out of all police killings is a gross under-estimation), just for anyone's curiosity, in France police killing of a threatening person is the outlier. [1]
We don't have guns circulating freely around here (though some people have them such as for hunting). Many police murders take place in police custody (such as El Hacen Diarra just this month). According to the most comprehensive stats i could find [2], out of 489 deaths by police shootings (1977-2022), 275 victims were entirely unarmed.
[1] Not very scientific method: any case of police being assaulted and using "self-defense" is widely spread in the media, and those few cases per year don't account for the dozens of deaths every year.
>though i suspect <1% murder out of all police killings is a gross under-estimation
It's easy to track because anytime it happens it's instant major news on the internet. Trust me, in the economy of social media clout, few things rank as valuable as police murder.
Pretti was frontpage of reddit within 30(!) minutes of being shot. Even without bystanders there is a whole group of creators whose whole channel is combing bodycam footage for wrong doing. These videos are worth (tens) of thousands in ad views if nothing else.
Some, maybe all, ICE agents were body cams, but I haven't seen any footage. I'm not sure what the process would looks like, this whole ICE violence thing is only a few months old, whereas most regular police have had bodycams for 5+ years now and getting the footage is well established.
Police also definitely don't turn it off when it suites them, although some have, but again, it's a Streisand effect when they do. I really cannot stress enough that police doing bad things has extremely high monetary value for the people who find it, and you also get paid for the crazy bodycam videos you find along the way. If you're a cop and you turn off your cam before breaking the law, you are almost certainly going to be the face of a 1M+ view youtube video. People, like yourself and me, gobble that up.
It doesn't matter much anyway, because there is 100x more footage of cops doing bad things with their cam on.
Disclaimer: i'm far from an anti-vaxxer and i have a scientific background (though not in biology).
It's often hard to establish scientific consensus. When it's not hard, it can take a long time. Cases such as climate change are as easy as it gets: models are always a flawed approximation for reality, but denying climate change on a scientific basis is almost impossible nowadays because we have too much data and too many converging studies.
About a century ago, the "scientific" consensus in the western world was that there were different human races with very different characteristics, and phrenology was considered a science.
The question of who establishes the ground truth, and who checks the checkers still stands. Science advances by asking sometimes inconvenient, sometimes outright weird questions. And sometimes the answers provided are plain wrong (but not for obvious reasons or malice), which is why reproducibility is so important.
I don't think any entity should have the power to prevent people from questioning the status quo. Especially since censorship feeds into the mindset of the conspiracy theorists and their real truth that "THEY" don't want you to see.
There’s a difference between questioning the status quo and spreading obvious misinformation. Did the vaccine save lives? Yes. Did misinformation about the vaccine cost lives? Yes it did.
For sure, in retrospect. At the time, Pfizer representatives in front of the EU parliament would not testify that their vaccines actually worked. And there are laws to requisition supplies and strip medical patents as public health measures.
The fact that so much money was given to private corporations, in secret deals outside any legal proceedings, on unproven products, all while censoring any critics, really gave the conspiracy theorists water for their mill.
I believe they would have had a much harder time spreading their misinformation, if they couldn't have the street cred of having "the system" against them. That is, if we had the voice of doctors vs random loonies, instead of our respective corrupt governments vs anyone they're trying to censor.
The overwhelming consensus of both the scientific community and the medical community was clear as crystal, and in retrospect, correct. There were plenty of doctors speaking up; there was only one side of this argument that was too busy throwing paint at ER nurses to listen.
>Pfizer representatives in front of the EU parliament would not testify that their vaccines actually worked.
It's typical for people in science and related fields to use carefully chosen wording, to hedge, and to speak in terms of probabilities instead of certainties.
For a general public who is used to the unashamed and unearned confidence of the usual people who get in front of a camera (politicians, celebrities, pundits) this can make it appear as though the scientific position is one with a less solid foundation, when it's usually the opposite case.
Scientific communication has been focused on insiders for so long that many communicators don't realise how it sounds to the outside world. Even the fundamental terminology is affected - a scientific theory is an overarching explanation that combines multiple pieces of evidence and creates the best synthesis we can on a topic, but to a layperson the word theory means "vague idea".
> A lot of my peers have been incredibly active on social media the last couple years supporting Palestinians.
So it took from 1947 (if not longer) to 2023 to have this population become aware of the problem. Still up until a few months ago, at least here in France, it was very unwelcome (and even politically persecuted, via house searches and terrorism charges) to even mention the idea of a genocide in Palestine.
I remember over a decade ago quoting israeli settlers, newspapers and politicians arguing a genocide was ongoing. But at the time, calling it a genocide here in France placed you in the loony bin in the eyes of most people. Given some time, the iranian revolution of 2025-2026 will be well-known.
Beyond the differences outlined by other commenters (that western governments don't support Iran, but do support Israel), there's this difference that few feel compelled to get over-active on this issue because every one already feels concerned: all the TVs are talking about it, and even the right-wingers are on board. Overall, everyone (apart from some islamists) are convinced that the Iranian government is criminal. Now what can we do?
Continue spreading awareness ; your peers may get on board! But better, get informed and involved. There may be, for example, a kurdish-iranian diaspora near you organizing solidarity protests and proposing courses to understand the politics of Iran, get versed in jineology, or understand the basic tenants of democratic confederalism. There's also other diaspora. I would just encourage you to be careful with the "Reza Pahlavi" crowd, who support a fascist regime change in Iran and would encourage just as much horrible crimes as those we witness today, if they weren't done in the name of islam.
> those who are committing this massacre are MUSLIMS and support PALESTINE so this is a moral dilemma for the left lovers
I'm not sure if you're making this argument in good faith, but just in case. The iranian government has no love for socialists/anarchists many of whom have been executed (especially in the years after the islamic revolution) or live in exile.
From what politically active iranian comrades told me (in exile), the social movement in Iran is very much alive and there is an underground left-wing scene (for example an anarchist/punk scene). Likewise, the Jin Jiyan Azadi movement following the execution of Mahsa Amini is very much on the left wing, inspired by Rojava's democratic confederalism.
From a western european perspective (eg. me), the dilemma is not the one you presented. Sure some fringe groups have campist [1] tendencies, but that's far from representing the Left as a whole (which has historical links with the anti-islamist left-wing in Iran). The dilemma would be: how to support a people's revolution without supporting our own western empires making the situation even worse? The most moderate/imperialist liberals have learnt the lessons from the Taliban's comeback in Afghanistan and the return of black slavery in Libya: we can do better than bomb a foreign people.
Still, the demonstrations here in France supporting the uprising in Iran (at least those who are not organized by the fascists trying to bring the Shah's son to the throne) pretty much have the same crowd as the pro-palestinian demonstrations. I'd be curious, apart from obvious propaganda, where you'd find the idea that left-wingers wouldn't support overthrowing a tyrannical government.
(cue history course about the history of secularism and why opposing islamophobia is not incompatible with opposing islamism or any theological tyranny)
At least here in France, the "housing" they offer is just a mattress in a huge room with no intimacy and dangerous people around. Most homeless people are skeptical at first, but after getting robbed/assaulted they certainly will refuse temporary housing for the rest of their life.
If the authorities really cared about the homeless, they would requisition empty dwellings and assign them individually so people have a proper home to rebuild their life.
Sure, but does it not occur to them that property owners might be performing an important function such that a policy that causes most of them to leave landlording might worsen the situation of homeless people and other poor people?
Suppose the government instituted a rule that applies to any game developer and in particular to the developer's office or whatever structure he likes to be inside when he is developing games or meeting with the other developers working on the same game. The rule says that if the game developer leaves his office and fails to hire a security guard to watch the property, then 72 hours after the game developer's departure, anyone (including career criminals) have a legal right to take over the office (even if the developer's office is his home). Wouldn't that curtail -- possibly severely -- the quantity and the quality of new games developed in whatever jurisdiction the rule applies to? Or at least raise the price of games (to cover the cost of the security guards and to compensate developers for the hassle) with the result that some of the consumers who used to be able to afford to buy video games are now priced out of the market?
> Sure, but does it not occur to them that property owners might be performing an important function such that a policy that causes most of them to leave landlording might worsen the situation of the homeless and other poor people?
Sure, but I think most people feel stronger about helping people at the bottom of society, rather than the ones closer to the top.
Worst case scenario for the homeless, they remain homeless and have lesser life expectancy. Worst case scenario for the landlord with vacant properties losing their vacant properties, less wealth in the future.
> Suppose the government instituted a rule that applies to any game developer and in particular to the [...]
Yes, that'd be a terrible policy. Same if it applied to property. So luckily, there is nothing like that in Spain that works like you described it, regarding properties.
> Sure, but does it not occur to them that property owners might be performing an important function such that a policy that causes most of them to leave landlording might worsen the situation of homeless people and other poor people?
Yes, actually, that did occur to me, and when I put any thought into it at all I realized it made no sense whatsoever.
Owning things is not performing any function whatsoever. Landlords are leeches on society who remove much-needed resources and provide nothing.
Before you make the tired "but they provide homes" argument: no, builders provide homes.
Before you make the tired "but they make repairs" argument: that's a handyman, and a handyman generally does a better job and is not paid anywhere near as much as a landlord.
Before you make the tired "but not everyone can own homes" argument: the reason not everyone can buy homes is that our entire housing structure is based around making short-term home ownership and home ownership for cheaper than rent impossible. If you remove landlords from the equation, those incentives go away.
> Suppose the government instituted a rule that applies to any game developer and in particular to the developer's office or whatever structure he likes to be inside when he is developing games or meeting with the other developers working on the same game. The rule says that if the game developer leaves his office and fails to hire a security guard to watch the property, then 72 hours after the game developer's departure, anyone (including career criminals) have a legal right to take over the office (even if the developer's office is his home). Wouldn't that curtail -- possibly severely -- the quantity and the quality of new games developed in whatever jurisdiction the rule applies to? Or at least raise the price of games (to cover the cost of the security guards and to compensate developers for the hassle) with the result that some of the consumers who used to be able to afford to buy video games are now priced out of the market?
We have an actual reality we can talk about, we don't need bizarre hypothetical scenarios.
Nobody is saying that squatting is the solution we want. What I am saying is that if you refuse to address the actual problem, i.e. you refuse to get rid of landlords, then you can't be surprised when people whose disfranchisement you support decide to find solutions you don't like.
> > What is it about this issue that makes so many people wish to treat landlords harshly?
> Compassion.
I don't feel like that's the true motivation. Where is the compassion for the middle class worker who can just barely afford some house, just to have it stolen (see parallel threads in this discussion for accounts of that happening) then?
If it was actually compassion, we'd be advocating for the government to provide adequate services to all homeless, paid for by taxes with progressive taxation so the rich also pay into the solution.
> compared to how they see the people with a lot
As noted in parallel comments, the people with a lot are immune from having their property stolen/squatted because they can afford private security measures that make this impossible. The victims here can only be middle class property owners who can't afford private security to watch their property 24x7.
> If it was actually compassion, we'd be advocating for the government to provide adequate services to all homeless, paid for by taxes with progressive taxation so the rich also pay into the solution.
I think that is the solution which pretty much everyone who has compassion for the squatters is advocating for. I'm comfortable saying that almost nobody thinks squatting is a good solution to this problem.
The problem is, providing adequate services to all homeless, paid for by taxes with progressive taxation so the rich also pay into the solution, has to happen first, before you get rid of squatting protections. Because otherwise you're just taking away the bad solution and leaving no solution, for the people most harmed by the current situation. And mysteriously once the squatting protections are gone and property owners' problem is solved, homelessness stops being a conversation until the next time it causes a problem for a rich person.
You're noticeably vague on what you think "adequate services" means. I refuse to be that vague. There is one, and only one, solution to homelessness: homes. Not shelters, homes. Not mental health services (though that would be good, too), homes. Homes: places where you can have privacy and security and pets and the right to decide who gets to enter the space. Services that do not result in homeless people being in homes are not adequate.
Until I see a real solution to homelessness implemented I'm really not interested in solving the problems homelessness causes for better-off people. Solve homelessness, and those problems will likely go away on their own; if not we can talk about it then. But until then, I'm quite okay with society dealing with the ugly consequences of its ugly failure to provide homes for its people.
> But until then, I'm quite okay with society dealing with the ugly consequences of its ugly failure to provide homes for its people.
This ignores a fundamental characteristic of human nature. If you want people to help you out, you can't screw them over.
While I don't know anything about the legislative process in Spain, I guess it is not too different from elsewhere, so you probably need broad support from the masses (middle class) to make big changes.
We already established (elsewhere in this discussion) that the rich don't feel any impact from squatting. They have private security forces, so it is a non-issue to them.
So if we want the government to provide for adequate services, middle class support is needed. If we allow all middle-class property to be stolen by squatters, there will be zero support from the middle class to provide any help to the thieves. Like it or not, basic human nature.
> This ignores a fundamental characteristic of human nature. If you want people to help you out, you can't screw them over.
This is a totally naive approach. I have 0 hope that the rich will "help us out" no matter what we do--rich people don't become rich by being generous. Either we use our majority to make them be productive members of society and pay their fair share, or we get nothing from them. This idea that we're going to concede to them on a few issues and they'll suddenly stop hoarding resources is a total fantasy.
> We already established (elsewhere in this discussion) that the rich don't feel any impact from squatting. They have private security forces, so it is a non-issue to them.
I disagree. The middle class has largely been disfranchised from owning the homes they live in, so the idea that there's some massive section of the middle class that owns second homes they leave empty doesn't hold much water. The people you're talking about aren't middle class.
> So if we want the government to provide for adequate services, middle class support is needed. If we allow all middle-class property to be stolen by squatters, there will be zero support from the middle class to provide any help to the thieves. Like it or not, basic human nature.
Thank you for the strategic advice, but no thanks. This strategic advice you're giving sounds suspiciously like you trying to represent rich people as middle class, and represent rich people's goal of enforcing property rights as a step toward achieving goals that you don't even support. That may not be your intent--for all I know, you completely support the progressive taxation and regulation of landlordism necessary to provide (free) homes for the homeless. But if that's the case I think you're being naive: the promise that if we just give the rich people what they want they'll magically become generous and start giving back has been part of the conversation for decades, and those promises are never kept.
> > If you want people to help you out, you can't screw them over.
> This is a totally naive approach.
I would've thought this was the entirely uncontroversial part of my premise!
Are you seriously saying that you feel the way to get people to help your cause is to screw them over?
We're going to fundamentally disagree there. The whole premise of politics is to find ways to make alliances to achieve goals. If you make most people hate your cause, you won't get very far.
> the promise that if we just give the rich people what they want they'll magically become generous and start giving back has been part of the conversation for decades, and those promises are never kept.
Of course. That's just a variant of trickle-down economics, which is nonsense. The rich will keep it all very happily and never give anything back.
> The people you're talking about aren't middle class.
And yet, they must be. The actual rich are immune from house occupations. Their houses are either in private enclaves where you can't possibly get in, or in the case of standalone houses they have private security coverage where you can't possibly get in.
This is how it is in the US. I realize the article is about Spain, so perhaps the very rich act different in Spain and they just let their multiple properties sit unguarded for long times.
> Are you seriously saying that you feel the way to get people to help your cause is to screw them over?
No, I'm saying that we don't need rich people to help our cause, because non-rich people are the super majority.
> And yet, they must be. The actual rich are immune from house occupations. Their houses are either in private enclaves where you can't possibly get in, or in the case of standalone houses they have private security coverage where you can't possibly get in.
There's a lot of rich between "private enclave with security force" and middle class that can't afford a second home to sit empty that you're ignoring.
Sure, multibillionaires are above it all. But I think you're drastically underestimating how rich one has to be to have even one empty home. If you own the home you live in you're already on the upper side of middle class. And if someone breaks into the house you live in, there's no place in the world where that person has legal protections.
> No, I'm saying that we don't need rich people to help our cause, because non-rich people are the super majority.
So, we agree on that.
We just have different perceptions of who "the rich" are.
A software engineer making $100K/yr (in a low cost of living part of the US, not in silicon valley) is not "the rich", but these people often have multiple apartments. I know first hand since many my of my friends are in this demographic.
> Sure, multibillionaires are above it all.
It doesn't take a multibillionaire to own more than one house/apt. It just takes a middle class income person in many parts of the country.
> And if someone breaks into the house you live in, there's no place in the world where that person has legal protections.
Ended up watching a few news reports from Spain to understand these home invasions better.
Here's one example where an 80 year old woman left the house she was actively living in for only two days to visit her son elsewhere. After coming back two days later the house had been invaded. The police say they can't do anything. That they supposedly have to wait 24 hours (then changed to 48 hours) and start a judicial process. Even though this was her primary residence and was only gone two days.
> I don't feel like that's the true motivation. Where is the compassion for the middle class worker who can just barely afford some house, just to have it stolen (see parallel threads in this discussion for accounts of that happening) then?
If you have someone trying to break into the house you live and stay in, you don't call them "okupas", it's trespassing/breaking and entering. One quick police call and you'll get help to have them thrown out.
The squatting/"okupas" thing is about occupying otherwise vacant properties.
What would be more interesting is to have statistics about empty dwellings. The banks have evicted countless people after the 2008 crisis, but are they renting those places now? If so, how cheap is it?
There is no shortage of housing. There is a shortage of rentable affordable housing, due to an epidemic of greedy landlord accaparating the market.
I don't think that's a fair characterization. Most AP implementations famously don't have privacy features: it was by design (and therefore no surprise to us tech folks), but i remember it was quite the scandal when users found out Mastodon instance admins could read users' private messages. A later "scandal" involved participation in the EUNOMIA research project about "provenance tracking" in federated networks [1], which to be fair to conspiracy theorists does sound like an academic front for NSA-style firehose R&D.
That being said, Bluesky is much harder to selfhost and is therefore not decentralized in practice. [2] See also Blacksky development notes. However, Bluesky does bring a very interesting piece to the puzzle which AP carefully ignored despite years of research in AP-adjacent protocols (such as Hubzilla): account portability.
All in all, i'm still siding on the ActivityPub ecosystem because i think it's much more ethical and friendly in all regards, and i'm really sad so many so-called journalists, researchers and leftists jumped ship to Bluesky just because the attraction of "Twitter reborn" (with the same startup nation vibes) was too strong. At least in my circles, i did not meet a single person who mentioned the choice of Bluesky was about UX or features.
But now, i'm slowly warming up to the ATmosphere having a vibrant development community. Much more so than AP. And to be fair to ATProto, it is worse than AP from a centralization standpoint, but at least it's not as bad and complex as the matrix protocol which brought 0 value over AP/XMPP but made implementations 100x more complex and resource-intensive.
[1] https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/825171/reporting
[2] https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/
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