[cowsup]

> how does bluesky solve the problem of building your castle in another man's kingdom?

Bluesky (the platform) doesn't, and they acknowledge that. It's centrally owned, and is prone to all of the risks that any other centralized platform offers.

> if I do something controversial or using regulatory arbitrage, I'm interested in how AT is useful for managing that risk.

AT is completely decentralized, like email.

If your account is @motohagiography.example.com, other AT instances will make a DNS query to example.com to see if that has an entry that the AT protocol recognizes. If so, it will make a connection to that instance, and gather your content for display.

However, if a particular instance sees their a volume of unwanted accounts from example.com, they could blacklist that domain from interacting with their instance, so, even with this setup, you are at the mercy of the "big players" respecting you — just like if you try to send email to users using Gmail and Google decides you're suspect.

And, if you violate the laws of where you're located, law enforcement will handle that the same as they would if you violating the laws over HTTP or over email.