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.
Discussion
Sure, but to borrow some ideas from #urbanism, I do think that "infrastructure determines culture" to a certain extent here.... The major barriers of entry for anyone like Blacksky to spin up alternative systems creates a situation where the "exit / voice" dynamic is heavily skewed towards "voice", and users feel their only option is to fight battles rather than do their own thing.
The design of Bluesky was intended to allow for tribal portability such that a PSS banning you didn’t really matter, you’d just move your data and use a new one. AFAIU (and I don’t follow it closely really) that isn’t quite what has happened.