There are no instances in ATProto

Where do I login to ATProto. It's not an application. It's a network of applications.

Where do I login to Bluesky? https://bsky.app

Where do I login to Mastodon.social? https://mastodon.social

People use apps, not networks of apps. Saying you don't care about the broader ATmosphere is exactly the same as saying you don't care about the broader Fediverse. That's fine, but then let's compare apps to apps instead of an app to a network. How does bsky.app compare against mastodon.social? (Actually let's not do that, because comparing a single app in a decentralized network to a single app in another decentralized network is pretty boring).

> Are you kind of admitting that Bluesky isn't actually practically decentralized

The data is meaningfully decentralized (more so than any AP app). The user identity is meaningfully decentralized (more so than any AP app). Moderation is meaningfully decentralized (similarly to AP apps). Independently developed applications are meaningfully interoperable (more so than most AP apps, especially leveraging DIDs). People can and do run their own AT infrastructure all the time. Ask questions instead of trying to pin people with gotchas based on incorrect assumptions.

In fact, in cases where Bluesky _did_ go down, Blacksky was still working fine (if a little slow due to the amount of Bluesky people on Blacksky), and people were able to make posts and everything.

What we have is a "diaspora", what was once one larger community has moved on to a lot of smaller, more disparate spaces. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but a lot of trade offs were involved, a very large community feeling was lost, and a lot of intangibles were lost (friends with Gmail accounts that could easily follow and interact with us in Google Reader but are lost trying to navigate any other RSS Reader, for instance).

That doesn't mean other places aren't doing so. As an example - here's a list of all the relays that mirror the ATProto network: https://atproto.at/relays

There's 16 relays by my account, of varying sizes. Of course, you don't have to query a relay - you can look at the Personal Data Servers (PDSes) directly.

Speaking of - there are just over 3000 PDSes: https://blue.mackuba.eu/directory/pdses

Each of these PDSes hosts one or more accounts, and you can self-host your PDS to truly own your data up and down the stack.

There's also oodles of different applications, of which Bluesky is just one. There's:

* Germ (encrypted DMs, Signal competitor)

* Leaflet (blogs, Substack/Medium competitor)

* Semble (link collection/sharing)

* BeaconBits (location-based social media, like FourSquare)

* SkyReader (Google Reader)

* Keytrace (cryptographic identity proofs)

* Smoke Signal (social events)

* Teal.fm (Last.fm)

* Goals.garden (goal/habit tracking/accountability)

* Tangled (GitHub)

* Sifa (LinkedIn)

* BookHive (Goodreads)

* Streamplace (Twitch)

* Spark (Instagram)

* Grain (also Instagram)

* Popfeed (Trakt)

* And more, like the TikTok clone I can't remember the name of, some more blogging platforms, a (fairly dead) Hackernews clone, some games, etc.

That isn't even mentioning all the Bluesky clones like Blacksky, Eurosky, Northsky, and W.

Each of these shares the same account - the account on your PDS, which you can self-host on any computer with an internet connection. I run mine alongside my smarthome server. Because they share an account, they interop - I can subscribe to a blog on Leaflet and have it show up in my Bluesky feed.

These services can fetch data from your PDS directly, or they can look at the Relay and get the full view of the network - but frequently, they don't need to.

Bluesky went down a couple months ago and many of these services were all perfectly usable, because they used the protocol but not any infra provided by Bluesky itself. The people who couldn't access the network were the ones who relied on Bluesky to host their accounts - which is a majority of the network, sure, but in the same way that Mastodon.social is a good chunk of Mastodon's network. I was able to use Blacksky to post onto Bluesky while Bluesky was down, because I was self-hosted.

Now both Eurosky and W have launched; Eurosky is aiming to be fully independent this summer and I _think_ that W already is? W's a bit more closed-off than most of the other projects I named, going directly after Twitter-as-it-is-now and not Twitter-as-it-was (hence why they chose W to compete with X).