On the one hand, SV-speak has trained me to read acquisitions as an end of good stuff. On the other, if this ATProto experiment really is something different, we need to be willing to consider that old patterns don't hold and expect something better.
one fundamental issue in atproto is the missing permissions layer, the proposal is insufficient for many use cases, graze was shut out of their main financial path by Bluesky (paid creator posts, Bluesky cut off talks)
tl;dr - people want control and privacy, not an open anonymous read all the data in the world, foundation for their online social activities, and this needs to be core to a protocol