Stephen Downes

What's great about this article is that it really clearly defines the distinction between Mastodon and Bluesky, arguing that the question "where are the instances?" is a Mastodon question, and doesn't really apply to Bluesky. But I think it's misleading in three major ways. First, there are instances in Bluesky, but there are different types of them: 'atproto hosting' and 'apps'. The fact that there are so few 'atproto hosting' instance is an issue. Second, it under-describes the ATmosphere architecture by leaving out the 'personal data store' (PDS) entirely. And third, it argues that atproto is just like RSS and Google Reader. But RSS is a simple text file any person can create in a text editor (so, for that matter, is a PDS, sort of), while a 'atproto hosting' instance is a very large and complex piece of software that consumes massive resources. So too are the apps, which for some reason, must handle "the whole Atmosphere". And the whole argument raises the question: why can't we simply have PDS readers as apps? What is the whole 'atproto hosting' infrastructure buy us, except control over our identity?