But I think it’s important to understand that Bluesky has, effectively, created a technological poison pill: by building on an open protocol, ATprotocol, the system itself can be rebuilt outside of Bluesky, but in a way where everyone can continue to communicate, and that creates incredible incentives that undermine any evil billionaires, and would actually punish Bluesky (or anyone else!) should they try to enshittify.

Bruh, ActivityPub is right there, and we already have places where people can communicate. And it's already built in such a way that anyone can make use of it. Currently not so with ATprotocol.

When BlueSky has interoperable servers that anyone can spin up, then this conversation is worth having, but if the protocol at all requires "the next person" to have tons of investment capital to get things running again, it's still just a billionaire-buyout away.

Bluesky has created the illusion of what we already have with the Fediverse.

That doesn't really work when the overwhelming majority of the users are on bsky.social anyway. Like sure I have my own PDS so technically my data is mine, but if they decide to turn off ATproto it barely will have any effect at all for most Bluesky users.

It can still be done and has been done before many times https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish

Wishful thinking. Look at Wikipedia. Open everything, total content dumps available as single tarballs, "free the communities" as one of their founding tenets when it started, lots of spammy mirror sites, yet everyone is still stuck there. Main reason is the stupendous search rank makes everyone go there. This is one reason I decided to block search engines from my personal site. It's ok, no one reads it either way.