> How does ATProto solve the problems that the last 10–20 years have shown seem intrinsic to all social media once it hits a certain scale?

It doesn't. There is currently no single design that eliminates all the major pathologies at once. Social media harms come from a mix of business incentives, ranking systems, scale, moderation burdens, and power concentration, so fixing one layer does not automatically fix the rest. Recent research on decentralized protocols shows that they aim to redistribute power and user agency, but they also face governance problems and risks of power re-concentrating at key decision points (see the discussion section in [1]).

[1] https://arxiv.org/html/2505.22962v1