It seems there are fully hosted and self-hosted options for ATProto/Bluesky now, I stand corrected on that front.
Out of curiosity I looked into what it would take to build my own social media service on top of ATProto. The technical architecture is interesting, but... what would I actually gain?
I chose Mastodon back in 2022 when Bluesky was still invite-only and had no self-hosting story. ActivityPub is a W3C standard. Mastodon gGmbH is a non-profit. The Fediverse has years of proven independent operation across thousands of instances.
Bluesky PBC is a US for-profit company that controls protocol development, although they have made statements about wanting independent governance. Yet the network remains heavily centralized with most users on bsky.social.
Running my own Mastodon instance already gives me sovereignty. ATProto doesn't offer more of that, arguably less given the current state of things. Not saying people shouldn't build on it. But for someone already running independent Fediverse infrastructure, it's hard to see what value it would add. I didn't see the appeal back then and I don't see it now.
#Bluesky #ATProto #Decentralization #SelfHosting #SelfHosted