This practically means nothing tbh. Social networks when they gain economies of scale due to the network effect will effectively shed all the pretense of open source and open platform etc.
We’ve seen it with Facebook, Google, etc, during the 2010’s with closing of chat standards and destruction of XMPP. Reddit 3rd Party API access is another example of this. We’ll see it again.
They’re the same answer.
You need money to market applications to users. Bluesky is sold the same way that Twitter is, your favorite moron celebrity might hit like or retweet on your stuff.
It’s not about serving assets it’s about hiding telemetry from adblockers, dns filters, ip lists, etc.
Almost every B2C company I’ve worked at, I’ve written or had my devs write proxies for whatever trackers we use. The reality is that every company to whom this data matters to figure out their business model will proxy their trackers. If they don’t they need to fire their lead engineers.
It’s actually pretty easy to disguise this traffic even to the point where you can use the originating server/cdn to interleave the tracking with the content source.
Both approaches have a load the world problem.