As said many times before, Jack is now AWOL and left for nostr, he even deleted his bluesky account because the crowd didn't like him there. He doesn't have a majority on the board and don't own any majority stake either.

The motivation for a new protocol is there's architectural limits to activitypub. It's essentially email over http, it really behaves like public mailing list archives, as servers push each interaction as a message. This is part of why there's often a discrepancy between visible replies across servers because retries are limited. Account portability is also very limited as accounts and posts are tied to a server.

Bluesky switches to a content addressing model plus user ID based on a public key, allowing you to more easily move across servers as well as syncing data between servers such as thread replies, it's very much like git (user data is held in personal repositories signed by your key) with a shared CDN/cache (relay servers, previously called BGS) and "worker agents" (mostly driven by the "appview" which is the api endpoint for your client + feed generator servers). You post to your repository via your appview, it sends a ping to other servers and they sync new relevant entries.

They already have federation with 3rd parties in a sandbox network and the official server just switched on "internal federation" (used to be a single shared server, now there's 10 using the same protocol that open federation will later use)

The code is already open source, several servers in the sandbox is 3rd party reimplementations