despite designs to innovate on old schemes, the social protocols of ActivityPub and AT carry forward old schemes' baggage

ActivityPub maintains the server centrality and control
AT maintains the network topology, across multiple servers yet converging into social platforms

with both you have to hope and trust that the admins across these servers won't go awry or sell out to the worst people

AT tries to mitigate by sort of splitting apart singular server structure, but as its creators demonstrate, one can run them all together, and so the problem it seeks to address nevertheless reemerges

ActivityPub keeps singular servers but compels running many for a distributed network topology of independent admins to emerge

both continue to overlook that no matter how you redistribute or restructure the backends, many people have no interest in running any part of that themselves. this is a major reason the big platforms arose, why AT's design resulted in just another big platform, and why there are large instances with ActivityPub's design

it's the hard problem of network design, i guess, how to make server operation accessible to all, and/or how to make maintainable server software without allowing yourself to see into everyone's business.