Everyone* using AT is using it through BlueSky. If you're not trying to reach those people there isn't any reason to use AT, it's just RSS with an identity centrally tied to BlueSky PBC.
The majority still use bluesky PBC's infra but that's increasingly less true.
- Blacksky has their own full appview for bluesky nowadays + relays and PDS w/ something like 60-70k users. It's small compared to the total bluesky count but it's still very sizable.
- There are countless atproto relays running independent of "big bluesky" and they only cost like 20usd/month max nowadays to run.
- Likewise it's trivial to host your data on any thirdparty PDS and scaling up a PDS community isn't terribly hard (PDS scale linearly up to like 500k users and then it scales linearly past that by just periodically launching a new PDS part of your "cluster")
- And most importantly the UX on migration is getting a lot better so it's reasonably approachable for average users.
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Side note but I noticed your name. Are you "the direwolf20"?
The majority still use bluesky PBC's infra but that's increasingly less true.
- Blacksky has their own full appview for bluesky nowadays + relays and PDS w/ something like 60-70k users. It's small compared to the total bluesky count but it's still very sizable.
- There are countless atproto relays running independent of "big bluesky" and they only cost like 20usd/month max nowadays to run.
- Likewise it's trivial to host your data on any thirdparty PDS and scaling up a PDS community isn't terribly hard (PDS scale linearly up to like 500k users and then it scales linearly past that by just periodically launching a new PDS part of your "cluster")
- And most importantly the UX on migration is getting a lot better so it's reasonably approachable for average users.
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Side note but I noticed your name. Are you "the direwolf20"?