"why did they choose the ATProto?"
The cynic in me: because it's centralized.
Governments may talk a big talk about things, but at the end of the day, they're legacy systems and they want control.
Alas, too many seem to have not acknowledged that the Internet is already an intergalactic system of collaboration and already operates at scale of billions of users with billions of packets per hour.
Legacy meatware governance is obsolete, but the transition period is going to be long and drawn out and in the interim, a lot of "reinventing the flat tire" will presumably play out, ad nauseam. ;(
We already had end-to-end encrypted realtime libre/free open source "federated" (I would use the phrase: "distributed") systems such as SILC (Secure Internet Live Conferencing) before ActivityPub (or twitter or Facebook, etc.) was ever conceived of in the first place. But, why was it never popularized? It circumvents centralized control and the "powers that be" don't like not being able to ratchet down on others. Class warfare is their paradigm, so they prefer to perpetuate such things, rather than normalize new paradigms which make themselves obsolete. ;-/
IRC? XMPP? FTP? HTTP? Other plaintext by default protocols, very popular! Spies just love spying!
Note: SILC isn't alone, there's PSYC2, GNUnet and other libre/free end-to-end encrypted comms systems; but as much as some may claim they want such things, what seems to gain traction and momentum every time? Over and over again? Insecure, centralized, systems. If you follow the popularity and the "money" it's usually the same old dirt bags behind the scenes pulling the strings.
CC: @_elena@mastodon.social
The cynic in me: because it's centralized.
Governments may talk a big talk about things, but at the end of the day, they're legacy systems and they want control.
Alas, too many seem to have not acknowledged that the Internet is already an intergalactic system of collaboration and already operates at scale of billions of users with billions of packets per hour.
Legacy meatware governance is obsolete, but the transition period is going to be long and drawn out and in the interim, a lot of "reinventing the flat tire" will presumably play out, ad nauseam. ;(
We already had end-to-end encrypted realtime libre/free open source "federated" (I would use the phrase: "distributed") systems such as SILC (Secure Internet Live Conferencing) before ActivityPub (or twitter or Facebook, etc.) was ever conceived of in the first place. But, why was it never popularized? It circumvents centralized control and the "powers that be" don't like not being able to ratchet down on others. Class warfare is their paradigm, so they prefer to perpetuate such things, rather than normalize new paradigms which make themselves obsolete. ;-/
IRC? XMPP? FTP? HTTP? Other plaintext by default protocols, very popular! Spies just love spying!
Note: SILC isn't alone, there's PSYC2, GNUnet and other libre/free end-to-end encrypted comms systems; but as much as some may claim they want such things, what seems to gain traction and momentum every time? Over and over again? Insecure, centralized, systems. If you follow the popularity and the "money" it's usually the same old dirt bags behind the scenes pulling the strings.
CC: @_elena@mastodon.social