alt Hacker NewsI think the analogy presented here is broken. RSS doesn't depend on Google Reader at all. Even at its prime, RSS depended less on Google Reader than email depends on Gmail now. In ATProto, AppViews heavily depends on Relays to be useful, and Relays are quite expensive to run. Also, the yellow circles which represent blogs in the RSS illustration are really not of the same nature as the same circles which represent posts on Facebook. Blogs are self-sufficient, for example.
I'm not saying ATProto is bad at all, but I feel like this blog post adds more confusion than it clarifies anything.
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> Relays are quite expensive to run
While relays are among the more intensive parts of AT Protocol infrastructure, their cost of operation is still something most people can afford: approximately $30/mo now. What is truly expensive and difficult is something that will be immutably so regardless of how centralized or decentralized you are: moderation.
The author of this piece wrote about this common misconception about relays 9 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45077291#45078223
Relays are actually quite cheap now! They used to be a bit more expensive when they archived all the traffic, but in sync 1.1 that was dropped and they can be run on $20/mo VMs pretty trivially now