I’d also call out that activitypub has the same threat model in the form of ICANN, as it’s also heavily dependent on DNS for identity. I believe these are reasonable trades to make; realistically the alternative is to use a blockchain, which few people are keen to do.
Honestly that’s just as much because atproto is a raw data protocol. Putting an http frontend on an atproto account is something we encourage and a lot of folks do. I do that on pfrazee.com for instance, and my leaflet blogposts (which are canonically on atproto) render on my blog.
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
The public side is extremely important for agents though. Agents need up to date public information to do their job. Every other service is going closed. Public information and activity should be a commons.
Yeah I’ve met the Radicle people a couple times. I’ve never given it a thorough review but, for their goals, their designs have always seemed strong, and they’re pleasant people to chat with.
The main difference was atproto wanted to tackle scale, so we went with a servers & aggregation model. Radicle is going for device-to-device networking as a primary goal.
Yeah the problems they seemed to have were over collaborative data structures with permissions. You’re right about how atproto solves that, which means you’re using CRDTs if you need to collaborate. If that’s a fit mismatch, I’d tell people to just appoint api servers which wrap a repo and provide the needed semantics.
The simple answer is that atproto works like the web & search engines, where the apps aggregate from the distributed accounts. So the proper analogy here would be like yahoo going down in 1999.
Just want to add that the AT Protocol IETF working group has been formed, and the PLC directory independent organization and board has officially been established. I’m at the closing talk for this years Atmosphere Conference as I write this and it’s really an incredible community of devs.