It isn't really, it's "Postel decentralization" (a lot of early internet services people might have assumed were distributed were in fact just a guy, John Postel).

I don't think that matters in this context where the rules apply regardless of decentralization. However, I believe that you can in fact just use the protocol without any of the "age verification" nonsense the UK government has imposed on us.

It isn't, it relies on a single BGS router server.

My understanding is that Bluesky is a service built on top of a decentralized protocol, ATProto. This allows users to use alternative hosts for their data instead of the bluesky servers, but if you're using Bluesky then they still hold your data.

I also think the private DMs might be hosted externally to ATProto because that is all meant to be public information or something.

I would assume that the age verification is built at the app layer, so you could use an alternative app (I think they call them AppViews?) to get around the age verification thing. Don't know if alternatives really exist today though, there are probably some.

That's what Jack Dorsey realized too, which is why he's a Nostr guy these days.

Good human customer service may be a turn off for VCs hoping for a unicorn. It doesn't scale infinitely, so if you need customer service to make your thing go - and presumably you do otherwise you wouldn't have a rep for good service, you'd have no service and no one would notice - your product probably isn't going to go stratospheric.

Customer service is one thing, but GDPR data requests are a matter of legal compliance.

From their privacy policy page:

    Data Protection Officer: Bluesky has appointed a Data Protection Officer (DPO). You may contact our DPO at Ametros Group Ltd, Lakeside Offices, Thorn Business Park, Rotherwas Industrial Estate, Hereford, Herefordshire, HR2 6JT, dpo@ametrosgroup.com.

    Data Protection Representative: Bluesky has appointed a Data Protection Representative (DPR) for both the UK and EU. You may contact Bluesky's EU Representative at Ametros Ltd, Unit 3D, North Point House, North Point Business Park, New Mallow Road, Cork, Ireland, gdpr@ametrosgroup.com. You may contact Bluesky's UK Representative at Ametros Group Ltd, Lakeside Offices, Thorn Business Park, Rotherwas Industrial Estate, Hereford, Herefordshire, England, HR2 6JT, gdpr@ametrosgroup.com.

This shows that the author should file a complaint with the Irish DPA (assuming they're an EU national) or the UK's DPA if they're from there. Bluesky repeatedly exceeded the applicable legal deadlines.

They seem to have outsourced their compliance to https://ametrosgroup.com/ which would probably explain why it takes forever to get them to comply; the people dealing with the legal paperwork don't have access to the API to run a data export because they're a completely different company.

[delayed]