AT Proto isn’t really supposed to be about individuals self hosting the whole thing. The system is supposed to be global, distributed, and shared, not isolated to one person self-hosting the whole stack. One person should be able to host a resource and connect it to the network (esp to host their own data). It’s just a different design goal compared to full-stack self-hosting. Fundamentally speaking, you can’t run Twitter at scale on a home laptop. But if lots of people band together their resources by hosting distributed microservices, they can self host it together. That’s what AT Proto is trying to solve

If it was more DNSy it could be hierarchal. I should be able to run my own stack and treat is like an RSS feed, subscribed to the various domains and individuals I'm interested in. Larger (but not huge) players could create plc directories of users and various aggregated feeds. Why have the expectation to host the global firehouse just because you want to customize how relays and appviews work?

Agreed. If you wanna be able to host the whole stack you should just use Mastodon