Let's say I make a post on Bluesky, which is decentralized. My post is very contentious. It is blocked by the moderators, and the moderation service can't be disabled on bsky.app. I am now invisible on bsky.app.

So when this happens where do we go? Forget about "instance brain", your problem is Bluesky is vastly more centralized in practice than the theoretical marketing. Because if it was truly practically decentralized you could actually point to numerous instances of the service, but last time I raised this point there were... 3. Except one of them was actually not running the full appview and we weren't 100% sure the other one was either.

I'm sorry man, but this isn't going to cut it. A lot of people are absolutely right to not be sold on ATProto as it stands: there is no obvious reason to believe it will become more meaningfully decentralized over time rather than less. As it grows larger, the feasibility of having more "instances" that can run completely independently of Bluesky PBC becomes even less plausible.

If over 99% of the users are using Bluesky PBC infrastructure and placeholder DIDs, almost all of the keys to the kingdom lie in one place, and at that point you have invented Twitter with a ridiculous number of extra steps.

Can you explain to me why I would ever run my own PDS? Why would I pay to selfhost stuff while allowing someone to control almost everything I can see and do?

Unfortunately, this will never get answered. It's very easy to write a long blog post explaining how ATProto is technically decentralized. It's much harder to unpack how it actually isn't really.