strong agreement here

> Ultimately I don't see why you need a protocol for small social.

For me, it is less about the technical reasons and more about the movement away from corporate control to community ownership. The desire among people is there because the growing shared belief that what we have today is not healthy for our self or society.

One thing Bluesky nailed was simplicity for the average user. UX is super important. That was despite the protocol which almost all users, and non-users who've heard of Bluesky, have no idea about. However, it was the protocol movement that formed the foundation for their success.

That being said, you can only realize the vision (of the people taking back social media from the capitalists and enabling real competition in social media) with a well designed protocol. ATProto gave us a lot towards this. So I'm now contradicting(?) my first sentence in this comment.

Agree that you need a well designed protocol, but I think for small social, we're drowning in good protocols. A lot of the issues with ActivityPub, for example, come about because of socializing In the Large. Once you're just hanging out in a community it doesn't matter if someone trips and bans you or deletes all your messages; this is par-for-the-course for small social drama. What makes AP so fraught for large scale social is that small social drama affects the network as a whole. AP is just one example. IRC, XMPP, Matrix, mailing lists, they've all been working for years even decades.

I think you need someone to build out a good UX more than anything else. They who builds the UX will win the spoils IMO. There's plenty of protocol prior art to bolt on underneath the fact.