[edit now that I'm at a keyboard]

I spent some time reading the site, which is very heavy on marketing speak and light on technical details. But what it feels like to me is a standardized data structure that you can host wherever you want. So you can self-host, or third parties can compete to host your "pod" for you as dumb repositories.

The protocol includes a standard method for defining access permissions, so you can grant other third parties access so they can build apps on top of it.

Given who is behind this, I think he's trying to address the fact that security/identity weren't baked in to http from the beginning. This could be the right design; getting widespread adoption will be hard.