The bulk of the traffic will stay quarantined on the major sites like these because most people are passive and undiscerning. The new generation of smaller, higher quality sites doesn't have to worry about the Eternal September coming over and attracting the scammers, slop merchants, etc.
Lol, naive in the extreme. The majority of the slop is not eternal September noobs, it’s commercially motivated, people selling things, PR, like farming, bots astroturfing public opinion. It’s much cheaper to push slop than to moderate it.
These “small higher quality sites” will not have the resources to gatekeeper it. If, that is the at protocol world ever gets past one big site. You’ve actually got a lot more chance with smaller communities that are not connected with any protocol.
The slop can come from anywhere, including captive apps like Pinterest, so why use Pinterest? The ask is: how can you get a similar experience on non tech controlled systems? That does not mean you won't get slop, it means that Pinterest is not the gatekeeper to the user experience. There will likely be slop, but that is a distinct problem statement to solve for.
My concern is the gatekeeper (in this case, Pinterest), and avoiding them at all costs using the ability to build replacements swiftly using vibe coding on open protocols (although vibe coding is not required of course, it will simply speed time to market). ATProto cannot be controlled by design, so it is ideal for building apps that need social rails (as a Pinterest replacement might). What is Pinterest besides an app, a search engine, and an object storage system after all?
Tangentially, ATProto moderation primitives might be of use in detecting, tagging, and filtering AI slop (via media, metadata, and author/publisher signal), but more research is required on this topic.
> The majority of the slop is not eternal September noobs, it’s commercially motivated, people selling things
Right, and those people go where the traffic is. They're polluting Twitter. They don't find Mastodon/Bluesky etc. important enough to take over. Hopefully it stays that way.
Because ATProto is specifically designed to allow being NON-centralized. Unlike Pinterest. Yes, ATProto is new and most of the traffic is through a single site at the moment, but it is specifically designed to allow for that to change.
