... but any replacement you build will, in practice, have to include a single centralized "relay" that aggregates all content. Since that's a lot of content, it has to be run by a big, easily found, easily pressured organization. And everybody "porting their accounts across" means a flag day that's going to be almost impossible to organize in practice. It'd effectively be just as much work as switching to an entirely new protocol.
Maybe you could theoretically have an AT "app view" that takes data from multiple relays, but nothing in the implementation does anything to support that, and as far as I know nothing in the protocol does anything to help it discover the relays... which in practice means that even if you extend the app views to use multiple relays, there will never be more than a handful of relays with meaningful reach.
The AT protocol is at best a really crappy excuse for decentralization. And frankly a pretty poor example of open source too, given the usability and organization of the code they release.
Compare with, say, Nostr, which is actually decently decentralized... but, in not-unrelated news, suffers from massive content discovery problems. Or compare with Briar, which is even more decentralized but has both discovery and scaling problems. Or for that matter Usenet.
What is your example of an effective open network then? ATProto is specifically designed for effective discovery which means scale. The fact that you can sync the entire network - not a requirement but you can - is a positive. The trade then is, yeah, you have to actually sync the data.
Yes, it is the case today. Its not a huge proportion, but there are thousands on external servers, and we recently had a nice sized migration to blacksky
There are other instances running: https://zeppelin.social/
AT protocol is open source.
Bluesky is private but the underlying mechanism is OSS and accounts are portable.
Go build the replacement and people can port their accounts across.
... but any replacement you build will, in practice, have to include a single centralized "relay" that aggregates all content. Since that's a lot of content, it has to be run by a big, easily found, easily pressured organization. And everybody "porting their accounts across" means a flag day that's going to be almost impossible to organize in practice. It'd effectively be just as much work as switching to an entirely new protocol.
Maybe you could theoretically have an AT "app view" that takes data from multiple relays, but nothing in the implementation does anything to support that, and as far as I know nothing in the protocol does anything to help it discover the relays... which in practice means that even if you extend the app views to use multiple relays, there will never be more than a handful of relays with meaningful reach.
The AT protocol is at best a really crappy excuse for decentralization. And frankly a pretty poor example of open source too, given the usability and organization of the code they release.
Compare with, say, Nostr, which is actually decently decentralized... but, in not-unrelated news, suffers from massive content discovery problems. Or compare with Briar, which is even more decentralized but has both discovery and scaling problems. Or for that matter Usenet.
What is your example of an effective open network then? ATProto is specifically designed for effective discovery which means scale. The fact that you can sync the entire network - not a requirement but you can - is a positive. The trade then is, yeah, you have to actually sync the data.
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Can you elaborate on that? I thought you could run your own instance and your identity was in the EDID.
In theory, but is that actually the case today? I couldn't find any information about the current state of federation for Bluesky.
Contrast this with Mastodon which already has a vibrant federated ecosystem.
Yes, it is the case today. Its not a huge proportion, but there are thousands on external servers, and we recently had a nice sized migration to blacksky
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Most people will never learn. It's an endless cycle.