People describe ATProto as federated, and that has always bugged me. And I think I figured out why. It's not NOT federated. But that's deceptively incomplete. It's much more complete to say that ATProto is brokered.

I get why they do it. ATP describes itself as federated, after all. But there's a broker, and everything is mediated by the broker, which they name a "relay" (and used to call a big graph server, which was actually more honest).