It costs $34 a month for an experiment. It doesn't cost anywhere near that for a node that is running, used by thousands/millions of people, ingesting millions of pdses. Don't be misled by a nice experiment. You need servers, backups, people to run that. See what real world deployment looks like: a little bit under 100k a year for the only independent full stack.

There's no need to self host as there's already public third party instances you can switch to.

Yes it's possible. It's just not the default. That's the issue

it's not something the fediverse is immune to either.

true, although no one said the contrary

This is just incorrect. RSS is probably one of the least centralised protocols right now, it's not even federated, which makes me question why the author even included it as an example

The argument isn't whether something exists, it's what people use: rss is amazing but it's far from being mainstream. The default path to following isn't rss, which is the point (and the problem).

It's not an argument against federation. It's an argument to look beyond the niceness of a tech.

[–] irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 day ago

Blacksky doesn't just run a relay, they run an appview (way more expensive than a relay) and pds (admittedly pretty cheap).

The point of atproto isn't to have many different groups running the entire stack, you can use an appview by one group, powered by a relay by another, while using a pds by a third.

A relay I listed in the comment is a real-world one that is currently only costing the creator $30/month, which is ingesting all PDSes, and being used by a lot of apps.

true, although no one said the contrary

While the article itself didn't say it, the overall attitude of most people on the fediverse is that.

I do agree with you that users aren't exposed enough to third party infrastructure, and that most users using bluesky's servers is a problem, but the alternative is the jankiness of the fediverse, which completely puts new users off.