Relevant post by Christine Lemmer-Webber (Co-creator of ActivityPub) https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
The main part of ATProto that is centralized is the PLC and that will eventually be made (most likely) into a consortium. PDS hosting is debatable
That being said, it should be possible to run completely independent atproto networks today. We have several dev infra setups for doing it in the ecosystem
But does anyone do it? It doesn't really matter if it's /theoretically possible/ if no one actually does it.
Running an ActivityPub server is piss easy, anyone can do it on a $5 VPS or in their basement, and that's one of its big strengths.
same statement can be applied to running a bluesky PDS. Here are the server recs: https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds?tab=readme-ov-file#sel...
Based on his progress posts it seems that ATproto is intentionally moving in the right direction and BlackSky has progressed to the point he’s asking for volunteers to move off Bluesky and try out his implementations