Comment by danabramov

I actually agree with you on a lot of these things, I just think that they do relate to the technological shape.

To give you an example, Blacksky is in setting up their alternative server that is effectively forking the product, which gives them ability to make different moderation decisions (they've restored the account of a user that is banned from Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/rude1.blacksky.team/post/3mcozwdhjo...).

However, unlike Mastodon and such, anyone on the Blacksky server will continue living in the same "world" as the Bluesky users, it's effectively just a different "filter" on the global data.

Before AT, it was not possible to do that.

You couldn't "fork" moderation of an existing product. If you wanted different rules, you had to create an entire social network from scratch. All past data used to stay within the original product.

AT enables anyone motivated to spin up a whole new product that works with existing data, and to make different decisions on the product level about all of the things you mentioned people care about. How algorithms run, how moderation runs, what the standards are, what the platform affordances are.

What AT creates here is competition because normally you can't compete until you convince everyone to move. Whereas with AT, everybody is always "already there" so you can create or pick the best-run prism over the global data.

Does this make more sense? It's all in service of the things you're talking about. We just need to make it possible to try different things without always starting from scratch.