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So yeah, like I was rambling out the other day, we basically have confirmation that self-hosting doesn’t equal sovereignty. Even if you run your own PDS, the app layer remains the choke point. Bluesky proper (or any other dominant client) can quietly choose not to surface your content.

ændra and others are circling this in the thread this came from, but IMO they’re all still thinking in old-school federated terms, where blocking a whole server is the nuclear option. I would argue that the actual dynamic now is subtler and prone to more shenanigans.

If I had to sum up: decentralization isn’t freedom if discovery and aggregation remain centralized; having your own PDS will simply make you the proud owner of a private ghost town unless the central graph decides you’re worth routing.

Independence would require multiple competing ingestion layers, not a scattering of self-hosted servers beneath one central arbiter. Basically, the issue isn't hosting; it's routing. Who controls the map decides whose voice is audible. ATProto doesn't evne CONCEPTUALLY engage with this problem.

ATProto solves for identity portability and data sovereignty at the account level, which is effectively all storage layer. It doesn't consider and never addresses the attention layer, which is where the actual power dynamics manifest. I mean, it's the Maginot Line problem in protocol form.

The last war was over centralized hosting being a direct chokepoint. If Twitter nuked your account, all your data and social graph were gone. So the response was: decentralize hosting so now one can delete YOU. But time moves on, and the dynamics are going to shift if they already haven't.

The risk now becomes that Bluesky doesn't need to delete you, they just stop indexing you or quietly downrank you in the trust graph. Which, yeah, is less of a problem for established media types, so a journalist PDS might be "safe" because they're primed to notice this anyway.

These are areas it treats as neutral plumbing rather than political space. I don't think you really solve this with any one trick. You have to pluralize the attention layer and make exclusion expensive, visible. Competing aggregators.

I suspect the "bring your own algo" days were a hint toward this idea, but that always felt half-baked. Once the Twitter migration waves kept coming, place pivoted to being a replacement rather than a full experiment due to those pressures. Can't really fault them there.

The hard part with the algo stuff isn't ranking, it's ingestion. Bring your own algo only really controls how you sort what's alrady arrived in your feed.