alt Hacker NewsThere’s no such thing as “running a domain” or “atproto provider” in atproto. You’re approaching it with a Mastodon/AP mindset and it doesn’t match that.
In atproto, there’s two axes.
One is hosting. Bluesky offers hosting but some people host on their own (it’s just a Docker container with sqlite), some on Cloudflare, some on community-hosted nodes like https://npmx.dev and https://selfhosted.social. From app perspective it looks exactly the same way (unlike in Mastodon where “hosting” = “choosing a community”) and you can switch hosting anytime.
Another axis is apps. Apps aggregate from data from all hosts. Bluesky is an app, Tangled is an app, Leaflet is an app, Wisp is an app, Semble is an app, and so on. Those can all aggregate over the same data (which enables cross-app interop) but they don’t have to (eg Bluesky doesn’t overlap with Tangled much except that Tangled can reuse Bluesky avatar on login). Generally you don’t have people running copies of the same app (as in Mastodon) which is why there aren’t many “blueskyes”. But when someone has an incentive, they can. (Eg Blacksky is a complete fork including server and DB, allowing their own moderation decisions over same data.) Similarly you can build your own app on top of distributed Tangled data.
Hope that helps clarify why “atproto provider” as a concept doesn’t make sense. You have hosting, which is as distributed as you want, and you have apps, which anyone can make.
Replies
You're interpreting my post with the assumption that I don't know what I'm talking about. You don't need to explain the protocol to me.
Domain here referred to the area of influence or control, like what the provider of a relay effectively has. The fact that other groups can run any element of the infra themselves doesn't change the fact that the drift towards centralization is much greater with ATP than with AP.
ATP has its own uses (quick aggregation) but it doesn't even attempt to solve fundamental issues of current ecosystem of social networking,. AP, on the other hand, offers the foundation for further development in the right direction.
So does Bluesky app have control over what data it aggregates and can decide (without checking with a user) not to aggregate data from a host? I am trying to understand what are the implications for a user, and a bad scenario where one would disagree with an action of the app.
And if the answer is "yes" then at least when someone "makes their own app" can they easily use "Bluesky hosts list" + add special extra hosts (or remove specific hosts) so that the app relies on the platform, with the exception the disagreement point?