I've been working on a protocol design that could solve these issues. What I'm seeing in a lot of the critiques of social media infrastructure boils down to the power dynamics that emerge when infrastructure and community ideology are bundled, when the protocol layer and application layer are built together and are designed to depend on each other.

Bluesky was designed FOR the communities on the "Blue" end of the spectrum (Western, liberal) as an alternative to centralized social media platforms that censor or allow infiltration by people with opposing ideologies, and the decisions on how the protocol layer works are colored by that initial intention. The goal was to create an alternative to Twitter, but not necessarily to address the underlying issue that plagues all of our social media options right now.

Blacksky was explicit in trying to create a safe online space for the Black community, mitigating harms like racism. To do that, they built their own PDS, a custom Relay and custom feed generators. This tied the infrastructure design goals to the community the application was being designed for, meaning that the ideological purity is built into those deepest infrastructure layers.

Nostr is much closer to the ideal, separating identity and message transmission away from any centralized authority. But the Achilles' heel is the same. Relays, like the PDS nodes of AT Protocol are volunteer silos with the node managers and hosts doing the work of deciding what to host, or giving up that kind of power and authority and letting it be a free for all without an economic incentive. Anyone can spin up a Nostr relay node and open it up to the world, or close it off to a specific set of users.

I'm seeing a need to fill the incentive gap by creating a financial incentive at the storage layer that would guarantee neutrality, basically turning data storage into a utility service. This would allow community based applications to be built tapping into this storage layer and performing the ideological filtering and curation without the operator needing to feel the pressure to censor or gatekeep the storage infrastructure itself. They way this could happen is by using the metadata tags on the content itself, which would identify the creator, the topic, and whatever else the application being used is designed to add to the tag details. This would change the negative filter (I don't want XYZ) into a positive filter (I DO want ABC), without changing anything at the protocol layer itself.