Ngl thanks for the detail, I went and had another look so correct me if I’m wrong.

• Anyone can host a open source PDS like the Bluesky PDS.
• Anyone can make an AppView to view these PDSs.
• Someone with many resources needs to host a relay.
• Also it seems that Bluesky is able to gatekeep access to its federation of PDSs on a per AppView basis? The details are a bit confusing.

So if we wanted to undermine Bluesky’s currently - hopefully temporary - centralised state, we would need multiple community modified PDSs, a widely rehosted open source AppView webapp & iOS/Android clients, a very expensive relay that is community controlled via non profit or something, and then we would be federated with each other and the bluesky infrastructure too?

Sounds like a lot of work just to recreate the user-end functionality of ActivityPub :/ Very confused why they felt the need to invent ATProtocol? I have heard some vague praise of it over AP but I think I’m not technical enough to really properly make that comparison. It’s nice that ATProtocol gives you ownership of your data though.

Perhaps Mastodon/ActivityPub-apps need to improve their onboarding process and user experience. Maybe include the custom feeds feature for Bluesky too. Something has to have gone wrong for Mastodon to have failed where Bluesky succeeded.