Are we decentralized yet?

I think this compares AT proto PDSes to Fediverse instances. In many ways this actually underplays just how grossly centralized AT proto currently is, since some of the components are 100% centralized still. (Whereas Fediverse instances, all downsides considered, are at least self-contained fully-independent instances.)

Which components are you referring to?

In case of Bluesky, there will also only ever be a single instance of the App View. As far as I am aware though in practice there's really only the official relay or indexing services either.

Why can't someone run another App View?

You can, it just won't be the Bluesky App View, so it's not really Bluesky. It's not like the fediverse where the instances own the URLs of the posts: they go through app views and there's a canonical URL to a Bluesky post and that's through the official app view.

This seems misleading.

Different AppViews would obviously be branded differently, but the whole point of ATProto is that there is a shared "picture" of the world. People are running alternative AppViews that consume Bluesky posts (and serve Bluesky threads).

Here's the same thread on three different AppViews:

- https://zeppelin.social/profile/did:plc:iyz5zf463ic52vqbonyu...

- https://blacksky.community/profile/did:plc:iyz5zf463ic52vqbo...

- https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:iyz5zf463ic52vqbonyu2ebu/po...

These are three independent webapps indexing the same information and serving it independently. They're not different frontends for one API; these are all independent backends.

one important correction is that blacksky is not hosting their own appview, they host their own PDS for users to join and a soft-fork of the official client

Ah, apologies, thanks! Lemme edit.