a very opinionated piece that leads by conclusion rather than building up to it.
The main part of ATProto that is centralized is the PLC and that will eventually be made (most likely) into a consortium. PDS hosting is debatable
That being said, it should be possible to run completely independent atproto networks today. We have several dev infra setups for doing it in the ecosystem
BlackSky seems to be run by a competent dev with a high enough profile that I see his posts regularly without following him directly
Based on his progress posts it seems that ATproto is intentionally moving in the right direction and BlackSky has progressed to the point he’s asking for volunteers to move off Bluesky and try out his implementations
https://www.blackskyweb.xyz - it's the black people community on Bluesky, they started first with some custom feeds and blocklists/labeller, now they have a PDS and relay, and they're planning to launch a forked version of the app and eventually have a full independent infra basically. With some extra features like option to make "internal" posts that aren't shared with the wider Bluesky but only with people on the PDS.
People are doing it yeah. The post linked in the comment above is already outdated, see https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lo7a2a4qxg2l for relatively recent developments.
> Running an ActivityPub server is piss easy, anyone can do it on a $5 VPS or in their basement, and that's one of its big strengths.
same statement can be applied to running a bluesky PDS. Here are the server recs: https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds?tab=readme-ov-file#sel...
> it should be possible to run completely independent atproto networks today
But does anyone do it? It doesn't really matter if it's /theoretically possible/ if no one actually does it.
Running an ActivityPub server is piss easy, anyone can do it on a $5 VPS or in their basement, and that's one of its big strengths.