It's like a very minimal version of ActivityPub. It takes an hour to go through the whole spec and addenda.
Then Jack Dorsey got interested, gave the project a big grant (in BTC), and a lot of crypto hype flew into it. But while it is a convenient excuse to say "crypto, therefore bad", the protocol is itself completely unrelated and IMO quite neat. There is a lot of potential for systems that anyone can comprehend in their totality in an afternoon.