if they decided to, sure they could. they don't want to and never will.

I am not debating that. But this same reasoning applies to @at or any other implementation. You have to be willing to implement the features and use the protocol. So I still don’t see why this is any different.

You keep asking questions, rejecting answers, and then saying you don't understand.

Perhaps it is time to read more about the protocol directly instead of asking questions on HN to poke holes in it from a position of ignorance.

I can set my offprint blog to use my domain, just haven't gotten around to it. The post is made on my atproto account, which is under my domain @tynanpurdy.com. All of the content lives under that account, on which I can attach a new domain handle at a later date if I so choose. Offprint is just one place to view the post. This is more durable than just posting to a website in that the content is indexable, discoverable, and reusable by a growing ecosystem due to the usage of standard broadcast rails and schemas. I get all the benefits of something like substack but without locking myself into that social graph and company.

Not at all. There are several active relays, some of which serve unique purposes such as the backlinks relay from microcosm.blue. Anyone can run a relay and it is cheap. The expensive thing is running a fully copy of the network in an appview.

in fact more relays just dropped today https://sri.leaflet.pub/3mddrqk5ays27

with every additional user, every additional post, the value of the open network only grows, and eventually becomes too big to ignore.

It depends how much you want to replicate. All you really need is the Application Data Server (or AppView) to aggregate the records you are interested in, serve them to your client app, and write them to people’s repos. I’ve been tinkering with the ‘personal website on AT’ idea space for a bit, tons of cool possibilities (and several people already have implemented cool AT integrations in their sites!). Happy to chat ab it.

HMU! I’m “shokunin.” on discord, leshokunin on TG / Twitter.

I’d prefer running our own thing separate from bluesky. We’d give people something like username.page.app and they’d make posts there. If people wanna follow on bluesky they can, and we provide a username that’s just the url.

I know we can do all this by just posting to Bluesky. But I want to give usernames, host the data on our end, and I’d prefer using the protocol but not be directly associated or dependent on Bluesky.