Readit NewsWith Wordpress, you have to worry about PHP, a database, etc. It’s the difference between being able to use GitHub pages, and needing either a VPS or shared hosting
As long as you have access to a computer that can run Hugo Version Manager (and who knows what else).
I am being facetious, obviously.
https://github.com/jmooring/hvm
Helpful for switching between different versions of Hugo.
Each of the pieces I've described (PDS, Relay, AppView) implement the protocol specified at https://atproto.com/. Anything that acts as an ATProto PDS can be used as an ATProto PDS, anything that acts as an ATProto Relay can be used as an ATProto Relay, and so on. I'm not sure I understand the question so pardon the tautology.
The structure allows federation by design — a Relay will index any PDS that asks to be indexed; an AppView can choose the Relay it wants to get the data from (or skip a Relay completely and index PDS's directly); anyone can make their own AppView for an existing or a new app. That's how there are multiple AppViews (both for Bluesky app and for other ATProto apps) ingesting data via multiple Relays from many PDS's. There aren't many independent operators of each piece (especially outside of PDS self-hosting) but nothing is privileging Bluesky's infra.
Additionally, Bluesky's reference implementations of each piece are open source. So people run them the same way you would usually run software -- by putting it on a computer and exposing it to the internet. To run a custom PDS, you can either use the Docker container provided by Bluesky (https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds) or implement your own (e.g. https://github.com/blacksky-algorithms/rsky). Ditto for other pieces.
>Reading through it, it just sounds like sharding/scaling for a centralized service that's meant to be owned and provided by a single entity.
You're right in that the goal is to make it on par with centralized services in terms of UX and performance/scaling. However, it is decentralized.
The picture at the end of this article might help: https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers
Reminds me of what happened in Bangladesh. Protestors opposed the leader, the leader calls them razakar (genociders, referring to the 1971 genocide), and they ironically started chanting "Who are we? Razakar, razakar!".
Of course, once she fled the country, the actual razakars ended up making a bid for power based on all the apparent support they had gotten ("look at our numbers!") and now are in line to run the country. And those who called themselves razakars now seem to regret it, realising that they were used and thrown away. This kind of negative polarisation ends up hurting way more.
Important rule of war-strategy: Always give your enemy a way out. Or they will carve a way out, and that would get ugly.
It had a unique routing UX (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeskola_Buzz#/media/File:BuzzS...) that allowed you to chain sources and effects using a graph. Bitwig has a similar idea in The Grid (https://www.bitwig.com/the-grid/), though that's limited to just one track; Buzz did this for the entire composition.
There was at least one rewrite attempt, and there are various clones (Aldrin) but they never quite made it.