If a team can't work within an existing standards body or a community (like the ActivityPub contributors) then they simply can't create an actually decentralized and open protocol/network. They can, however, create something that they can define and control for their own gain.

Rolling out this protocol on a site without a community forum or other discussion channel but simply a "give us your email address and we'll let you know when it's done" is a red flag.

Yeah.. when I saw that and something about joining a waitlist for something that should be developed in public I noped my way out. I hope other people learn have similar BS indicators and don't fall for this stuff. There is nothing open about joining a wait-list.

arcalinea

The waitlist is just for the app. We've been developing the protocol in a public repo on Github for months, but most people don't have the patience to follow open source code development, so we'll notify them when we can put a usable app in their hands.

MIT licensed protocol code, public since May: https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto