Isn't this just reinventing the wheel of a website, an email list and a message board?
Are the scientists referenced in this article really so averse to having a website or corresponding via email that they need a social media instance to chat with every Tom, Dick and Harry that can't put up with the friction of clicking a mailto: link? How did that go during Covid, when everyone on Twitter suddenly became an infectious disease specialist?
> So you could use another app like Blacksky and have the same exact posts, comments, and likes that you do on Bluesky. And if you ever decide that you don’t like what Bluesky is doing [...] you can move somewhere else, keeping your followers, connections, and content.
How is that different from moving to a new web host or newsletter provider? And what happens if your Bluesky connections don't move over to the new thing? Or if Bluesky chooses to create a read-only archive of your posts and changes the UI to obscure the ATproto ID or whatever it is that certifies the content as being "yours"?
https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers
This article does a good job of explaining some nuanced differences. Tl;dr - ATProto (public data) can be viewed as a distributed event bus that anyone can plug-n-play into. It's a good design imo