I do think it's a critical omission to not address the main player(s?) who are working on key parts of this, and where they may yet run into problems.
A system or protocol is whatever the easiest user journey is. Anything outside of that will never be seen by many users unless there is some value to be gained by going there. And that value has to be something gained now, not a hypothetical like insurance against future closing of the network. People don’t like to buy insurance.
People wine about BlueSky being too centralized, but the fact is that this type of infrastructure isn't self-hostable. You can do social-media over email a la Mastodon (which admittedly is pretty great), but most people will trade that for a walled garden.
The big problem is that all this AT infra is pretty much charity, which doesn't feel sustainable. I wish it could be funded more like public libraries than ad tech.
Bluesky works because people are told "Go to Bluesky" and they hide the federation. When you're told go to Mastodon and pick mastodon.social or any of the hundreds of other servers, you've lost. For some reason, the federation fans never understood this. I remember an interview with Diaspora's developers and they couldn't stop talking about how people can run their own servers.
Dude.
I have two friends who left Twitter for Bluesky. One's an HR rep and the other is a business analyst for warehouses. Does anyone think a selling point for them was that they can run their own Bluesky infrastructure?
25G < PLC postgres < 100G, depending if you want to keep all the spam operations (> 50%) and/or add extra indexes for a handle autocomplete service (like me, takes it over 100GB with everything)
Repo data (records) is in the double digit TB range (low end, without any indexing, just raw)
Blobs are in the Petabyte range.
I aim to find out current and accurate details soon.
Then there's "decentralized" in the sense that the protocols that govern are open and anyone can plug in without permission. This is how email works in practice. Most people do not choose to run their own email servers, but they nonetheless benefit from the fact that people who are interested can do so and provide email service.
Bluesky is the second kind of decentralized.
is really to find a good enough middle ground that has competitive enough UX to get people off of the fully centralized, locked in social media providers. In the broader context, ATProto to me means user choice and provenance, which ATProto does better than any other protocol. See all the parts beyond just data hosting, where the entire distributed system is plug-n-play. [1]
ATProto not being purist, preferring pragmatism, is what attracts me over alternatives like AP and Nostr.
[1] https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers
They're the first alternative full stack, the first alternative AppView, and that is something that the author should have mentioned. However, it weakens the argument so they left it out.
"Number of contributors" has never meant impact. You wouldn't dismiss openssl or curl, ya know?
And plenty of people people posting racist stuff about White and Asian people.
It's no better than Twitter or 4chan at this point.