Exactly. There's a lot of dogmatic hype with atproto, which is kinda giving me early crypto/NFT vibes. Any discussions or criticisms are quickly snuffed out or labeled as toxic or uninformed, or devolve into whataboutism.

A lot of the content on bluesky, but especially in its early days, is about how the protocol is great, its potential and what bright future it will lead us into. Their main investors are a crypto bro company. Their CEO has built her career around crypto. It's the same rhetoric.

Now it's about decentralized "verification". They still haven't defined what they're verifying except a vague term "the person posting is who they say they are", but it's not actual identity verification.

The endgame is probably monetizing the protocol by connecting it to some form of identity for crypto-bs or paywalling engagement via the verification.