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So hear me out: managed single-user PDS hosting for journalists

Applications still have discretion to remove individual accounts from the application. Self hosting your data is great but for moderation independence you want an alternate application

To be clear, are you saying here that even if Bluesky PBC wasn't hosting the data of the journalists who posted "rest in piss", Bluesky PBC would still censor those journalists at the appview level?

The action happens at the AppView level. And the rest in piss actions got reversed

Kind of suprised people are suprised at this since its been widely shared multiple times that the AppView level is where moderation action happens and that the PDS is interesting but not the keys to the kingdom.

Yep. Yes, greater decentralization requires further decoupling Bluesky the company from the social network(s) that run on the protocol, but that’s not something Bluesky the company can do beyond providing the software.

It'd probably bring in less revenue than even their white-label domain selling endeavours, but a few docker containers with the software and affiliate links to VPS sellers (e.g. linode, digitalocean, vultr) to run them on would go pretty hard.

Perhaps, but its important to remember that billions of dollars and thousands of man hours have been lit on fire trying to escape the advertiser model of social media. All have failed. Unless bluesky wants to be a squashed eggbug on the road, they will have to accept ads eventually.

The other piece is "monolith" vs "decouple systems". Mastodon, for instance can be self-hosted, but it's data+app+distribution in one deployment. ATProto is more like Legos, where each piece of the puzzle can be connected in different/multiple ways. Folks aren't used to that architecture yet.