... but any replacement you build will, in practice, have to include a single centralized "relay" that aggregates all content. Since that's a lot of content, it has to be run by a big, easily found, easily pressured organization. And everybody "porting their accounts across" means a flag day that's going to be almost impossible to organize in practice. It'd effectively be just as much work as switching to an entirely new protocol.

Maybe you could theoretically have an AT "app view" that takes data from multiple relays, but nothing in the implementation does anything to support that, and as far as I know nothing in the protocol does anything to help it discover the relays... which in practice means that even if you extend the app views to use multiple relays, there will never be more than a handful of relays with meaningful reach.

The AT protocol is at best a really crappy excuse for decentralization. And frankly a pretty poor example of open source too, given the usability and organization of the code they release.

Compare with, say, Nostr, which is actually decently decentralized... but, in not-unrelated news, suffers from massive content discovery problems. Or compare with Briar, which is even more decentralized but has both discovery and scaling problems. Or for that matter Usenet.

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pfraze 2 days ago | parent [-]

What is your example of an effective open network then? ATProto is specifically designed for effective discovery which means scale. The fact that you can sync the entire network - not a requirement but you can - is a positive. The trade then is, yeah, you have to actually sync the data.

	▲	nout 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Nostr actually does much better with content discovery recently. Partially because of the new "outbox model" of connecting to relays and partially because there are couple "nostr client" companies that do good job in people & top notes discovery (e.g. Primal - it's a centralized company providing quite good service to the open network).
	▲	Hizonner 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> What is your example of an effective open network then? I'm not sure there is one. But that's because I don't accept the idea that "likes" and "follows" are the best way to find content, or even a good way. If you do accept the idea that those should be your primary way of discovering content, which Bluesky does seem to accept, then decentralization becomes a more important criterion, and Nostr or even Mastodon is more effective that AT. Unfortunate about the culture on Nostr, though... You could maybe build a system that I would think was better by, say, indexing Nostr using some kind of DHT. But you'd have to do some things to traditional DHTs to make them more attack-resistant. And maybe more things so they could scale to that size. Having "topics" like newsgroups or subreddits would be another approach, and could probably be grafted into pretty much any protocol.