purlane

I think you should reread my comment, as I have already answered this. The "control" that shareholders have over the company is severely limited, and they have limited legal recourse against company leadership if they decide to use profits in a manner they disagree with, but fulfills their charter. It should be fairly obvious in my example that it is not in the best interests of the shareholders to quite literally give away profits.

That is not what this means at all. Legally, it means that the company has other priorities that it must consider equally to creating profit. This means that investors have a much higher standard to have standing to sue the company or oust the CEO if they don't return a profit or don't return profits directly to investors.

A good example of what this means in practice is developer awards from Bluesky Social. As I understand it, once Bluesky PBC starts making some profit they are planning to begin placing something akin to bounties on successful app projects within the protocol. I believe Graber called this "Coopetition" at some point, where developers are "competing" within the ecosystem but simultaneously working together to make the protocol's foundation stronger.

This is something that a PBC structure makes immeasurably easier to do. Why? Because the company has more responsibilities than simply returning profit to shareholders. The shareholders can't simply sue the company or oust Graber because of this, since Bluesky Social also has a legal responsibility to "develop and drive large-scale adoption of technologies for open and decentralized public conversation". Please do get read on what it actually means to be a PBC.

The Wikipedia article does a pretty good job at giving an overview for it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT_Protocol

I can attest secondhand that it's possible to run a relay for ~€75/month, which is well within the range of many hobbyists.

Some more details about the implementations of video at the protocol level from an atproto dev in the API Discord:

- The canonical video data is stored in the user's PDS as a blob

- Videos are not displayed in-app until they have been transcoded and injected into the CDN by a separate transcoding service.

- As an optimization, Bluesky's client uploads videos directly to the transcoding service, which then uploads the processed files to the user's PDS using a service auth token. The overall design decisions for the protocol seem to lean towards delegating transcoding to a separate service to keep PDS implementations as simple as possible.

- Independent clients/apps can choose to upload videos directly to the PDS and rely on the transcoding service to pick them up, but doing this might not provide clear error messages for for things like rate-limits, access denials, or file format issues.

- The video service is not open-source at the moment primarily due to security concerns (e.g. transcoder escape attacks)

- The Bsky team expects the maturity of S3-compatible object storage to make video storage manageable for PDS hosts.

The biggest upside compared to PeerTube is probably discoverability. In ActivityPub, the network architecture means the video ecosystem is fractured and there’s no one cohesive place to find all PeerTube videos.

In atproto, the network is continually indexed by relays, which means that it doesn’t make a difference what app you use to watch videos - you’ll find the exact same ones regardless of the platform, since they’re all working from the same data.

This also means that different video platforms can provide different services for users without locking in users to their platform. Platforms would be forced to compete on what they provide to the user experience, not how well they can lock in users to their platform.

This sounds entirely reasonable!