AT vs AP

Issue with AP is that the experience is different per server, which you need a lot of for decentralization.

For AT, it fixes it by splitting up concerns. You can still have a lot of PDSes, thus having high decentralization there. You have less AppViews though (due to the general high cost in hosting one), and less differences in experiences (differences in the view of the network is when changing AppViews), though of course with a trade-off of more centralization there.

So basically yes. AT trades off some decentralization for a more consistent experience, at the network view level. While some parts of the network view can be self hosted, some cannot be (like a global search engine), and thus may be better done as communally-hosted rather than self-hosted.

The thing I'm thinking of now is... what if there are many AppViews? And one client connects to many? Does that evolve a Nostr? Hmm, maybe not, since Nostr Relays are expected to be empheral, while AppViews are expected to be persistent in their data — thus allowing thin clients. This means less such AppViews due to higher cost. What if each AppView only covers one person? Well then you have issues with search and stuff, wouldn't you? Not to mention replies and likes from people you do not know. The whole point of AppViews is that it is a view of the network — which also contains people you do not know.

While subscribing to multiple AppViews can be useful, to distribute funding effort, it needs to be a small enough amount that a small enough amount of AppViews used (one or two) can give insight to the majority of what the user wants to see.

Right. In the case where an AppView/Relay has banned a PDS, using that account while viewing multiple AppViews (some which banned some, some which didn't) wouldn't really work since some responses will fail (specifically, responses to posts which came from AppViews which banned the PDS that hosts the account you're currently responding from).

Subscribing to multiple AppViews would probably still help for non-censorship reasons. However, for censorship resistance, it is probably more reliant and cleaner UX-wise to have AppViews selected per-account. Or have it be done like BlackSky: if you use the BlackSky app, you use the BlackSky AppView.

Hmm... even if I have my own PDS, I still use it through the BlueSky website. Is this really needed? Well, of course the domain and web app can and should be self hosted. But the big thing is of course the App View -- the consistent view into the network. To be clear, we don't need a consistent view of a *the whole network* when doing something like SMTP or Matrix, since it's all private anyway. But with social media it's different. You do want a consistent view for global search, coherent replies, and linking people to it. I think.

(Yes, technically large groups in Matrix can be sort of a social network, but you do have a consistent view of *the whole group* which, while could be large, is still considerably lower than the consistent view of *the whole network* which is why it can be done in a decentralized manner instead of a semi-centralized manner like AppViews.)