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AT being backed by VC is false—it's Bluesky the company that is. AT is merely a spec for signing, storing and propagating structured data (records) + the identity that owns said records.

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and who controls what goes in to the spec? still Bluesky.

Not really. It's very open for everyone to participate. Further, Bluesky has been working on standardizing AT at the IETF [0][1]. They have also made a patent non-agression pledge: https://bsky.social/about/blog/10-01-2025-patent-pledge

In short, they're actively working on making AT as neutral as possible.

[0]: https://docs.bsky.app/blog/taking-at-to-ietf

[1]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/bofreq-newbold-authenticate...

We have already talked about this. In the end it comes down the index for the instances that bsky maintain it will inevitably be the dominate ones vs others who run AT Pro.

It would be all good if the index is shared via DHT, bittorrent, ips or other means. Same goes for the google search index, etc.

You're talking about Bluesky's ATProto instance (term.?). Other commenter is talking about ATProto as a protocol.

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