AFAIK actual decentralization needs still a big engineering effort.
I personally can't even imagine a world where their VC investors would ever sign off a "let's make it possible, easy and risk free the users to exit our silo" project, over the many ways they try to squeeze profit out of their users.
VCs funded Netscape which did more than any other company to launch the web and they made a lot of money without having to destroy the ideals of the web.
An atproto PDS is like a structured-data blog hosted on a web server. Anyone is free to index, relay, and render the data.
Bluesky should make these easier so your average Linux admin can attempt to host the full stack, as opposed to only being able to host a PDS. This would eliminate the criticism about Bluesky's design.
But certain things like full-network relays/app views just have inherent bandwidth/storage/compute costs associated with them but it's definitely something a non-profit (like Internet Archive) could easily afford to do.
The PLC service could likely be hosted for ~$40/mo.
If you want a small scaled down setup for just a small community, which still interoperates with the full network but doesn't have a complete network, there are setups like AppViewLite, which can run on, eg, an old laptop at home: https://github.com/alnkesq/AppViewLite
Personally, I don't think individualist self-hosting is a necessary or helpful goal for indexing the network. Most humans are not interested in spending the time or learning the skills to do this, even if it was as easy as setting up a self-hosted blog with RSS. I think small collectives (orgs, coops, communities, neighborhoods, companies, etc) exist and can fill this role.
Regardless, this is moving the discussion, which was about whether it was possible to decentralize each component the network, not whether it was pragmatic for individuals to self-host the whole thing.
That's crazy cheap! Everybody on HN should be able to run one of these, just cancel your Claude Code Max subscription
All kidding aside, that's incredibly cost effective and heartening to read. I expected the cost of running a relay to be much higher.
Well, this is exactly my point. ATProto's infrastructure is too hard for most humans, and that is the reason for the centralization complaint.
The team's goal should be to make it easier, so the complaint goes away.
I didn't know about these recent attempts, they're impressive for sure. However they write[1] about zeppelin:
"The cost to run this is about US $200/mo, primarily due to the 16 terabytes of storage it currrently uses"
So when you here give that $200/mo cost as a price point for "organized groups", you are forecasting that the cost of storage will go down as fast as the BlueSky data size grows? At what rate right now is the data size growing? Because the last numbers I saw were something like 2TB, so it being already 16TB sounds like $200/mo is not going to be enough very soon.
Bluesky Social still clearly dominates the ecosystem, but there is no single component of the system that does not have a open/alternative option for exit.
Do you disagree? Is there a specific centralized component you take issue with?
Users can move their follows, followers and posts to zeppelin.social fron BlueSky transparently?
Now you can of course debate on what "decenttalized" means, but in a social network easy migration between servers is the crucial feature that would allow the decentralized network to emerge.
Edit. Does the network actually work over at zeppelin.social alone if Bluesky servers go down?
I totally agree. However, a lot of people in the fediverse/ActivityPub world apparently (?) disagree, seeing as your domain is tightly coupled to your server, i.e. no name portability. Seems like a wild oversight to me, and getting massive instances like matrix.org and mastadon.social seems like an inevitable consequence.
Lack of name portability implies greater risk when choosing a server. Greater risk when choosing a server means choosing comparatively less risky servers. Choosing comparatively less risky servers means choosing more well-known servers. Thus you have the GMail-ification of the fediverse.
Yes, even if Bluesky was down (as long as they have a backup) which is not the case for ActivityPub.
Migration between servers is so seamless that is causes confusion and doubt that the protocol even supports migration, because there is basically zero in-app visibility of which users are on which server.
Yes, the network continues to work on zeppelin.social if Bluesky servers are down.
Making it hard to setup or run, complex to understand or change are also forms of discouraging independent use.