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from the HN comments, it's not a coincidence that SSB has a similar model (I built the first client for SSB)

I read this as “SBB” at first and thought you done work for Swiss rail and had many questions.

I guess if short form text social media is like email... I've had to spend a lot of time tiptoeing around Yahoo's spam filers and worrying about my reputation score. If a few big players dominate, how decentralized will it be, really? E.g. will the bigs dictate moderation policy to smaller servers?

How so? Have you guys determined how much it would cost monthly to run your own PDS node or whatever? Because that guy is talking about it like you paying a couple bucks like you would for a web host. I was thinking of it more like an entire Mastodon instance with potentially thousands of users.

I don't know the exact numbers but actually, yeah, an atproto pds is designed to be fairly cheap to run, for the same reasons this person is talking about

I'd be curious to see. I'm not sure what advantage one person would have running a single PDS for themselves unless they're really obsessed with privacy. It seems like something a community or multiple people would want to run to have specific moderation needs and a unique host name or something.

Cheap enough ISP's would offer them as part of standard package of services? i.e. here's your free e-mail and oh yeah here's your free point-of-entry to fediverse

don't want to over-promise, but you can run a smol PDS for like $5-10/month and can probably fit a couple dozen friends on that, if they aren't all top-1% prolific. over time image storage could creep up, but can put that in blob storage (eg, S3) pretty cheap. video could be a whole other story

Federation is inheritanyly bringing distributed things together under a common criteria. Right?

that's a decent definition of it: interoperation between multiple network entities to enable shared execution

every one of these writeups about How We're Gonna Make Decentralization Something Everybody Will Care About reads like the author's primary interest is fantasy worldbuilding

eh I figure the downstream effects matter to everyone at some point (otherwise wtf am I doing)

the real federation was the friends we made along the way

no yeah, Bluesky's got the right idea, it's all these other writeups I see that start from a place like "Alice wants to communicate with Bob, so she spends an afternoon doing research into which Mastodon instance is most closely aligned with her interests"