Not a would be cool, is cool. At least now that the atproto network has proved it is in fact cool.

I will say that I have no relation to bluesky so it's not my tech and I do find it amazing. This post from Dan Abramov might help in clarifying how 'decentralized' it is compared to the threadiverse https://overreacted.io/there-are-no-instances-in-atproto/

Dan's post "a social file system" also does a great job at explaining and motivating the data model behind atproto. It can do anything, not just microblogs!

> Thinking of RSS and blogrolls as a network feels much more resilient than blueskys Jetstream api endpoint.

Nothing to do with Bluesky services. There are many independent firehoses and relays. Here's a stream of standard.site blog posts coming in over a firehose hosted in Chennai. Every single one. No curator between me and the posts, and no work by me to crawl the whole network for them. https://pdsls.dev/jetstream?instance=wss%3A%2F%2Fchennai.fir...

Edit: ok there is an aggregator, the relay is scraping all of the PDSs out there to build the event stream. Notably this is not possible with RSS, where you need to build a large index with knowledge. PDSs request relays to crawl and that's that.

> Here's a stream of standard.site blog posts coming in over a firehose hosted in Chennai. Every single one.

This stream lacks any blog posts that haven't been specifically published to atproto. Conversely, I see RSS feeds for the content in the stream, like https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:byf7jvh3yvhffackiumpddtf/rs... (if RSS feeds exists for every profiles then I'd argue that atproto is a strict subset of RSS, but I'm not certain how that feature works). The stream may give you every blog post that was published to atproto, but that's already a small subset of long-form content on the web.

> Notably this is not possible with RSS,

The web supports blog discovery so well that people forget it exists. A simple Google search can find a very large amount of content, much available over RSS/Atom. Many web-based feed readers index the subscriptions across all their users to help with discovery. Here's the Feedland firehose, for example: https://feedland.com/?everything=true

I don't think its helpful to argue how complete the Google index is vs a bluesky firehose though. Most users are drowning in content and discovery is about search and filtering. There's lots of interest right now in vouching for the content of others: https://susam.net/wander/wander.js, https://codeberg.org/robida/human.json, https://www.manton.org/2024/03/11/recommendations-and-blogro..., etc.

and only have one feed? forgive me if I understand incorrectly but I'll take an open market of thousands of feeds and easy tooling to make my own that can pull from the whole network over just one local feed controlled by a server admin

I’ve gathered a few here! (On an atproto social bookmarking site :) https://semble.so/profile/tynanpurdy.com/collections/3m5epi5...

if they decided to, sure they could. they don't want to and never will.

I am not debating that. But this same reasoning applies to @at or any other implementation. You have to be willing to implement the features and use the protocol. So I still don’t see why this is any different.

You keep asking questions, rejecting answers, and then saying you don't understand.

Perhaps it is time to read more about the protocol directly instead of asking questions on HN to poke holes in it from a position of ignorance.

I can set my offprint blog to use my domain, just haven't gotten around to it. The post is made on my atproto account, which is under my domain @tynanpurdy.com. All of the content lives under that account, on which I can attach a new domain handle at a later date if I so choose. Offprint is just one place to view the post. This is more durable than just posting to a website in that the content is indexable, discoverable, and reusable by a growing ecosystem due to the usage of standard broadcast rails and schemas. I get all the benefits of something like substack but without locking myself into that social graph and company.

Not at all. There are several active relays, some of which serve unique purposes such as the backlinks relay from microcosm.blue. Anyone can run a relay and it is cheap. The expensive thing is running a fully copy of the network in an appview.

in fact more relays just dropped today https://sri.leaflet.pub/3mddrqk5ays27

with every additional user, every additional post, the value of the open network only grows, and eventually becomes too big to ignore.

It depends how much you want to replicate. All you really need is the Application Data Server (or AppView) to aggregate the records you are interested in, serve them to your client app, and write them to people’s repos. I’ve been tinkering with the ‘personal website on AT’ idea space for a bit, tons of cool possibilities (and several people already have implemented cool AT integrations in their sites!). Happy to chat ab it.

HMU! I’m “shokunin.” on discord, leshokunin on TG / Twitter.

I’d prefer running our own thing separate from bluesky. We’d give people something like username.page.app and they’d make posts there. If people wanna follow on bluesky they can, and we provide a username that’s just the url.

I know we can do all this by just posting to Bluesky. But I want to give usernames, host the data on our end, and I’d prefer using the protocol but not be directly associated or dependent on Bluesky.