I thought the whole point is that it’s built on an open protocol and decentralized? Granted a number of people couldn’t or wouldn’t, but you could self host if it gets too enshittified is what I’ve always understood.
Open? Yes.
Decentralized? Not in practice. ATproto fundamentally requires every participating node to index/process every message being sent around the network. The whole thing about AppView can be summed up as "a global indexed view of every event from every node".
ATproto delegates all the crappy parts (identity management, moderation) to those that would like to participate in the network, but all of that is pointless if your messages are not shared with the AppView servers.
This has been Bluesky's intent from day one: by letting people host their own data at their own PDS, but by ensuring that the communication is only meaningful if passing through their indexers, they are effectively aiming to be to the "Social Web" what Google became to the old www.
It is also not necessary for AppViews to index the entire network. Partial syncs of the atmosphere are suitable for realworld usecases.
In our scenario, they don't care where their 55M followers are hosted, but they do care about giving accounts to their ~5k employees and they want to be able to follow any of the newsworthy people and institutions: politicians, entertainment celebrities, athletes, etc.
What would be the requirements and associated costs for the NYT to provide this, and how do these costs change if/when more institutions decide to follow suit?
I won't have exact numbers until we actually finish that distro and deploy it, but my ballpark for 5k direct users with, say, 100 follows on average leading to 500k synced users, I'd say $100-200/mo with a max of $500. If you're not running a big instance, you're not paying big costs.
EDIT: I should clarify that the partial sync runmodel that we're developing will still operate on atproto's "shared heap" approach which means that activity outside of the selected sync-set (the 500k users) will not be visible to the NYT users. How we solve that limitation is an open question. We could introduce message-passing to notify about that activity, for instance. I think that's the most notable downside compared to a comparable AP deployment, which inherently operates on message-passing.
I'm really taking your "EDIT" as admission that ATProto will only be able to claim "actually decentralized" once it changes into something that resembles ActivityPub.
In addition, every round of VC funding also requires them explaning their VCs how implementing an open protocol and decentralization is going to help them pay their investment back - I do not expect such talks to go well the moment the VCs realize that both of those make it possible for the platform to effectively resist enshittification attempts.