>We plan to transfer that ownership to an appropriate, independent protocol governance organization in the future.

I never realized there is no independent governance org that should have registered this. So AT is governed by a single for-profit entity, that also runs the only viable instance?

There is an IETF Working Group these days https://atproto.com/blog/kicking-off-the-atp-working-group

Those can't register trademarks, of course.

> that also runs the only viable instance?

This is false, both in the framing ("instances") and in the viability of running alternative infrastructure.

> So AT is governed by a single for-profit entity

A Public Benefit Corporation to be precise. So they are legally obligated to favor public benefit.

"Only viable instance" is not really the correct framing - Bluesky doesn't have instances. Anyone using ATProto without Bluesky will still be "on Bluesky".

When you go to bsky.app, you're interacting with the Bluesky AppView; one key feature of ATProto is that any AppView can interact with any (consenting) Personal Data Server (PDS). So you can self-host your PDS but still use bsky.app if you so choose. But critically, anyone can write an AppView; there are reimplementations of Bluesky as well as other social apps that use the same ATProto infrastructure. That would be closest thing to a Mastodon instance, except you don't have to host your data on it in order to use it. Imagine being able to go to a Lemmy instance and just post things with your Mastodon identity, and have everything show up without Mastodon having to know anything about Lemmy magazines or its special upvote / comment formats.

The actual centralization in ATProto lies in a combination of unfortunate design decisions and genuine friction in the self-hosted path. Being totally reliant on Bluesky is the happy path, self-hosting your PDS data is difficult but doable, and being totally independent of Bluesky is only possible if you do everything correctly right at the start.

First off, Bluesky doesn't offer any GUI tools for PDS migration. If you want to get off their PDS, you'll need to bust out command-line tools and possibly do some steps in advance of when you need to migrate in order for everything to work properly.

Second, even if you're on a PDS, you're still reliant on the Public Ledger of Credentials (PLC) to host your Distributed ID (DID) document. The PLC is run by Bluesky, although they've taken steps to make it easy to notice if they were to do something fucky with the PLC. But let's say we don't like that. There is a solution: you can host your DID document on a normal web server. Problem solved?

Well, if you were setting up an account for the first time, then yes, the problem is actually solved, you're 100% independent of Bluesky. But if you made the mistake of registering an account normally, you have a did:plc identity. And one core principle of ATProto is that identity names never ever ever change. So if you go and make a did:web identity, it's like having a second account, there is no way to tie your old did:plc identity into it. In fact, I'm pretty sure you can't even redirect one did:web identity to another (say if you need to switch domain names)

Regarding Bluesky's "independent protocol governance organization", they made the same promise about the PLC; but it hasn't actually been transferred yet. I would be a lot more bullish on ATProto if there was a way to migrate DIDs and retain all your followers and shit. And if there was proper graphical tools for data migration.

Nothing Bluesky does is really independent. This is such a transparent playbook and yet folks keep falling for a couple of open source repos and whatever hot takes Dan Abramov posts to reframe “instances” to “open social” bs.