Everything trends towards centralization on a long enough period.

I laugh at people who think ActivityPub or Mastodon or BlueSky will save us. We already had that, it was called e-mail, look what happened once everyone started using it.

If we couldn't stop the centralization effects that occurred on e-mail, any attempt to stop centralization in general is honestly a utopian fool's errand. Regulation is easier.

I am a big supporter of AT Protocol, and I contribute some money to a fund to build on it. Why laugh at running experiments? Nothing will "save us," it is a constant effort as long as humans desire to use these systems to connect. Email exists today, and is very usable still as a platform that cannot be captured. The consolidation occurred because people do not want to run their own servers, so we should build for that! Bluesky and AT Protocol are experiments in building something different, with different use cases and capabilities, that also cannot be captured. Just like email. You can run your own PDS. You can run your own stack from PDS to users "end to end" if you so choose. You can pay to do both of these tasks. No one can buy this or take it away from you, if it is built on protocols instead of a platform someone can own and control.

Regulation would be great. The EU does it well. It is lacking in the US, and will be for some time. And so we have to downgrade to technical mitigations against centralization until regulation can meet the burden.

e-mail can't handle 24/7 1k posts/sec traffic which Twitter was about. A more appropriate analogue is IRC.