I think you fundamentally misunderstand how the protocol works.

First, Tangled has been entirely self-hostable since the beginning! We've just made it much easier to run for everyone.

Second, the "appview" is simply an indexer. It consumes records from the firehose and only those that it cares about. In our case, those are org.tangled.*. There's no reason we'd consume all of the firehose.

ActivityPub categorically does not make sense here because of how coupled identities are to instances.

> Tangled has been entirely self-hostable since the beginning!

As has BlueSky, as long as you had enough hardware to keep up with the firehose. The protocol heavily lends itself to centralization due to this design. I think this should be obvious by the fact that you haven't considered self-hosting to be the default case.

> In our case, those are org.tangled.*.

I suppose my wording was inaccurate, but this is what I meant by "the entire network". My indexer would have to consume "all of Tangled" instead of the things related to the repos, orgs and people I am interested in. Correct?

> ActivityPub categorically does not make sense here because of how coupled identities are to instances.

I feel like this is more of an inconvenience rather than a dealbreaker. Having to point people to a new account ID on the off-chance you lose your domain seems like much less of a problem than having to deal with ATProto's firehose architecture.