I'm not saying ATProto is bad at all, but I feel like this blog post adds more confusion than it clarifies anything.

I feel like you've (perhaps purposefully?) misinterpreted "instances" just to plug ATProto specifically at the expense of ActivityPub (and RSS, a bit). I think you lower yourself by doing this:

1. it forces you to omit and contort the interesting technical truths about ATProto and Activitypub, like Relays and their pros/cons for ATProto and account migrations and pros/cons for ActivityPub

2. it creates unnecessary conflict and criticism and seems unnecessarily divisive for 2 platforms solving problems in such a similar space

It's also just seems a bit silly: why would you assume that when someone asks "where are the instances?" they're not using the common mainstream use of the word "instances", like, servers, or running software, or VMs, or containers?

Sorry if this is overly harsh or I've misunderstood, but it gives me a strong vibe that it was motivated by disdain and frustration towards ActivityPub and ActivityPub users rather than wanting to legitimately inform the world about ActivityPub.

I did enjoy the diagrams and the explainers though! I just felt like the subtle digs and pops at activitypub were an unnecessary distraction.

As the blog mentions, the big improvement vs Mastodon is that Relays, AppViews and PDSes are separate services with their own distinct scaling demands. It's a rather beautiful solution to a system design problem.

[1] https://atproto.com/guides/glossary

The one down side of the system is the cost. It's cheap to host a PDS but expensive for other components. Users could not relies on "someone" for running those components for free forever.

Bluesky doesn't normally work that way - everything in the PDS gets replicated. They are also encouraging people to put put full blog posts in the PDS for easy replication. So, anyone who wants to index it gets a copy and you have no control over what they do.

You don't have to do it that way, though. You can publish your blog on your own website and just publish links to it on Bluesky.

At least that's how I understand it, because running an AP node is much more accessible to regular selfhosters than running one of those content relays in AT.

So all you'll ever "decentralize" in AT is your own data, it's more about owning your data rather than collectively owning a part of the network.

And we've been over this many times before on HN.

But I also found it a little frustrating, because it answered one part of the question but failed to answer the question so what does ATProto do to solve the problems that instances solve?

For example, when this article dismisses defederation as merely a mysterious reason you might not see posts from your friends, it fails to answer "so how does atproto solve the problems that defederation solves?". Because the default reasonable answer to assume, given this framing, is "it doesn't".

There's only one PLC directory.

There's very few full relays (edit: appviews), none that I'm aware of that don't mirror bluesky censorship/moderation decisions.

It feels almost "Freudian" to claim a thing is decentralized and then by analogy keep pointing to a massive (social) centralization of a decentralized ecosystem as a good thing. But especially one that we already know the ending for. Google Reader united a lot of RSS houses, value added a social graph and social commentary between them, and then at the whims of executives Google Reader fell and nearly killed RSS, but certainly destroyed an impressive social graph.

As an analogy that doesn't give me a lot of confidence in ATProto.

My concern isn't technology or culture, it's money. At the moment, ATProto is existentially dependent on Bluesky PBC, a venture-funded startup ($100M from Bain Capital). There are people doing good work to make it more decentralized, more power to them, but at the moment it's still deeply centralized. And it's hard to see what the business model is that will support what Bsky PBC does at a global scale. Eventually Bain will want to see a revenue stream that justifies their investment; maybe there's a way to do that that doesn't involve enshittification but it's certainly not obvious.

You can dislike the instance-centeredness of Fedi/Masto (seems to have worked OK for email over the decades) but it's an actual thing that's actually working. And offers account migration without losing followers if you don't like the instance you're on. And has multiple really excellent client software packages. And seems to be covering its costs through a mixture of Patreon, co-operative & nonprofits, some Euro-gov help, all without any VC input. It can't be bought or owned by anybody.

Put another way, this is a really interesting space. But the technology is less interesting than the culture, and the culture is less interesting than the m money.

So when this happens where do we go? Forget about "instance brain", your problem is Bluesky is vastly more centralized in practice than the theoretical marketing. Because if it was truly practically decentralized you could actually point to numerous instances of the service, but last time I raised this point there were... 3. Except one of them was actually not running the full appview and we weren't 100% sure the other one was either.

I'm sorry man, but this isn't going to cut it. A lot of people are absolutely right to not be sold on ATProto as it stands: there is no obvious reason to believe it will become more meaningfully decentralized over time rather than less. As it grows larger, the feasibility of having more "instances" that can run completely independently of Bluesky PBC becomes even less plausible.

If over 99% of the users are using Bluesky PBC infrastructure and placeholder DIDs, almost all of the keys to the kingdom lie in one place, and at that point you have invented Twitter with a ridiculous number of extra steps.

Can you explain to me why I would ever run my own PDS? Why would I pay to selfhost stuff while allowing someone to control almost everything I can see and do?

Unfortunately, this will never get answered. It's very easy to write a long blog post explaining how ATProto is technically decentralized. It's much harder to unpack how it actually isn't really.

Open source. BlueSky + Mastodon + NOSTR. Advanced feed algorithm. 100% of the code base is open source (in 2 weeks). https://m.jfksocial.com/

It makes the feed rank algorithm metrics clearly visible on the right bar. People can confirm they aren't being censored or deboosted by seeing their own scores made transparent.

The ability to forever tie your stuff to a person, strongly, is exactly what the surveillance state would want.

Mastodon's model gives you plausible deniability. It's safer.

In BlueSky, there is only one single "AppView" instance in the entire network. There is one instantiated "Firehose". Each user can instance his own "PDS".

In ActivityPub/Mastadon, the instances are "sender's server" vs "receiver's server."

The difference isn't that there aren't "instances" in AT proto. It's just that the instances are segmented differently.