Yes, good parallel, didn’t think of that. Perhaps there’s just a limit on how much you can decentralize without things breaking down for either social or technical reasons.

Very interesting, thanks.

Atproto scales quadratically, […] harms performance AP scales horizontally

Clearly true. But this suggests to me that ATProto might still work well with, say, 5 or 15 "PDS"s. That is still enough IMO to guarantee a high level of pluralism.

In a commercial market, let’s say for telephony or cars or web browsers, we readily accept that there are only a handful of players. Indeed, there’s generally an optimal number, high enough to guarantee competition but low enough that we can keep track of the brands and trust that they won’t go out of business tomorrow.

And nothing is stopping at least one of those few brands from being a “good guy”, akin to Mozilla’s historic role in the web-browser market. It could be run by say, Wikimedia, for example. At least we would know that it would not disappear tomorrow, which is more than can be said for most Lemmy instances.

I agree that there should be enough space for both ATProto and AP to thrive.

Very useful, thanks.

As I see it, Bluesky is fundamentally different from Xitter and it is a major step in the right direction. It is short-sighted to reject it because of some technical imperfections.

The fundamental question IMO is whether there is enough mindshare (i.e. users and attention) to allow ATSocial (AKA partial federation) and ActivityPub (AKA total federation) to both be successful. I’m thinking there is. After all, the vast majority of people are still on ad-fuelled corporate social media, with all its internal contradictions.