Comment by nightpool

Thanks, that's a fair point that I was overlooking. When I say a "federated server", I don't just mean a self-hosted PDS, I mean a third party app that potentially has its own lexicon and design decisions. Creating a robust third-party app that can meaningfully interact with the Bluesky network is still a very difficult engineering challenge, which I think this article does a good job demonstrating—that was the tension I was trying to underscore in my comment. Bluesky may be solving those engineering challenges for those clients who are satisfied with Bluesky's frontend and AppView, but every single other app built on top of ATProto will have to resolve those same challenges. This is directly downstream from Bluesky's "global firehose" topology and various design decisions that stem from that.