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say more? I thought the protocol was designed to be able to handle decentralization

There is still major centralization. Essentially, the relays crawl the network and provide an aggregated data stream, their firehose.

Independent relays can exist, which is better than the fully centralized options.

There is no financial incentive to bear the cost of running a public relay.

Thank you for the explanation!

Are there efforts to build a similar type of network which rewards running a public relay? I'm not sure how, for instance, Mastodon solves this problem

Mastodon has a completely different architecture.

In Activity Pub each node is essentially the full stack of what ATProto breaks up into individual entities. This means that each node in the fediverse is incented to connect to other nodes in the network, to provide good coverage to their users.

So a firehose isn't different than re-hosting Bluesky and it encourages re-hosting?

If you're critiquing, could you spell out your point more plainly?

I was just trying to extrapolate. Seems like if you can manage the firehose you could almost host your own indepenant non-central interface.

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