rsky

Chiming in to say as the CEO of Blacksky that not only do we have an independent AT Protocol implementation in Rust (https://github.com/blacksky-algorithms/rsky) Not only do we run a fully independent stack (https://docs.blacksky.community/readme/list-of-our-services) Not only are we getting paid by other orgs to stand up independent app view servers. We also received a license from Bluesky for the atproto trademark. There are no qualms in the ecosystem from people making money, getting users, and providing new experiences about this. It’s not “AT Protocol fans” who aren’t taking issue with this. It’s business with employees and organizations making a positive impact. It’s easy to criticize if you’re not actively shipping things.

I mean it's a repo with 1 very active contributor (https://github.com/blacksky-algorithms/rsky/graphs/contribut...), I get that they decided to skip on that

Okay, so this sounds like you'd want to run an appview + pds. (and possibly a relay, depending on some details.) Except for one thing: > or dependent on Bluesky. If you want to take this to an extreme, and are uncomfortable with how did:plc has not yet moved into its own org, then you'd want to also run your own plc server, etc. The problem with doing this is: > If people wanna follow on bluesky they can You lose this. Because you're now not running on the main atproto system, but instead a fully parallel one of your own. Anyway, you could start on this by running a PDS via the reference implementation here: https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds and then building your own appview (application). You could also take a look at Blacksky's implementation https://github.com/blacksky-algorithms/rsky and if you end up using it, consider throwing

>in what way can smaller players federate with ATProto or how the structure allows federation. Each of the pieces I've described (PDS, Relay, AppView) implement the protocol specified at https://atproto.com/. Anything that acts as an ATProto PDS can be used as an ATProto PDS, anything that acts as an ATProto Relay can be used as an ATProto Relay, and so on. I'm not sure I understand the question so pardon the tautology. The structure allows federation by design — a Relay will index any PDS that asks to be indexed; an AppView can choose the Relay it wants to get the data from (or skip a Relay completely and index PDS's directly); anyone can make their own AppView for an existing or a new app. That's how there are multiple AppViews (both for Bluesky app and for other ATProto apps) ingesting data via multiple Relays from many PDS's. There ar