A big part of these types of outcomes is also based on the community that forms around them. Bluesky ended up, for various reasons largely unrelated to its underlying protocol, being adopted by a very specific community, and that community views policing untoward speech as a core part of how social media should operate (not passing judgement on that here!). While the protocol design attempted to do that at a higher layer, the community’s strong stance on moderation and the developer’s need to fight urgent spam and moderation fires meant that protocol neutrality took a back seat. Once it was there, with a rapidly-growing community that viewed this as good, it wasn’t coming back.