> I mean, this literally already happened (a person was banned, and Blacksky reversed that ban on their app server).

Blacksky is literally the only such example of alternative infrastructure that I know of, and obviously, it will not be applicable to the vast majority of people. Given the rising cost of hosting combined with the fact that the compute needs of running appviews and relays should theoretically only go up, I have a strong feeling that there will not be a lot more of them, either. It's already bigger than ActivityPub I believe and we're in the very low single digits at best.

Meanwhile, if we really did get a lot of these instances, then it really begs the question what the actual benefit of Bluesky's ATProto architecture is: if someone is banned on Bluesky and not Blacksky... won't users see a totally different view of the world? Isn't that the same problem ActivityPub sees? How does this really differ from defederation in practice?

> What is a better solution you’d like to see? I think it’s reasonable that there’s a market between these and if there’s enough demand, another app server can become popular.

If I knew how to fix this, I would probably be trying to help rather than criticizing ATProto. I don't think it can be fixed, so I don't have any suggestions.

> I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect that the apps shouldn’t be in control of their own moderation.

It kind of sounds like you're admitting that there is no real difference from a user standpoint with browsing to twitter.com vs bsky.app that have anything to do with decentralization.

I know I'm not going to win a popularity contest here, you don't even have to bother responding, honestly. But just being honest, I know you're a pretty intelligent person and the work you have done has benefited my life as a developer. I have a feeling deep down you also realize there is an inherent contradiction with Bluesky and ATProto's marketing pitch. I wish you would be honest about it.

The Fediverse has value specifically because of its downsides. A version of decentralized social media without those downsides inherently picks up almost all of the disadvantages of centralized social media. To me it seems apparent that all you can do is move the sliders around a bit, and Bluesky appears to net a very tiny percent of benefit from decentralization while bearing immense cost for it.