Uhm, I just can use another “app” to communicate with others who use the Facebook app?
I know this is obvious and I know someone will say no one cares, but since I'm bored let me show, again, this time using Paul Frazee's own words, how Bluesky is stupid:
https://pfrazee.leaflet.pub/3lz4sgu7iec2k
Notice how the "app" is still a fundamental entity in the scenario. An "app", here, is not a client, it is a server everybody that wants to be in that app have to connect to.
An "app" can do anything it wants, it can ban you, it can shadowban you, it can show you ads, it can require KYC for allowing you in, it can limit what you write or what you see, it can be very good but it has all the tools for being very bad, it's just the exact same thing as the big centralized app-platforms of today and always.
Now imagine the year is ~2005 and ATProto is the big deal, all platforms decide to use ATProto: everybody have your "PDS" that hosts all your posts.
Now Mark Zuckerberg creates an ATProto "app" and calls it Facebook and starts fetching posts from your PDS. Facebook is very cool and everybody is using it to talk about all the things, it becomes the "public square". Fast forward to 2020 and you say you don't like dogs, now Mark Zuckerberg decides to kick you out of Facebook for that.
You still have your PDS but you can't interact with anyone because everybody is using Facebook. How is this any meaningful improvement over anything?
Discussion
Can you do that on the current Facebook? You can as long as Facebook gives you API access or something like that. It's the same on ATProto.
I think I get it what you're saying. As today most data is stored with the the same entity who also controls the views infra (Bluesky controlling the PDs infra and the View).
I could be wrong, but I think he's getting at most users won’t bother switching clients just to see one person’s posts and they’ll most likely stick with the mainstream app (in the current case of at proto, Bluesky) - and in this case they won't be able to see your posts from another app because fetching data from your pds is prohibited by the main app overall, no matter where it comes from. Your friends would need to use the client that pulls from your pds to see them
not a knock on at proto but the concept of bluesky being a dominant app on at proto
That's a good summary. Also zooming out they're going about it one of the very few ways you can go about it if you want to complete with the UX of centralised services and to scale as they have. How their experiment ends up is wait and see, but if the goal is to compete on some level with that UX then it's pretty clear the Nostr/ActivityPub path is not going to work. Nostr and ActivityPub are for users that are willing to let go of certain key aspects of that UX, to embrace the chaos as it were.
I see, I think I get it :)
In the current context of being banned from a view, this now also results in your PDS being made inaccessable for other views (because both are controlled by the same entity).