Indeed, but you are not answering the question: how can you reconcile the idea that ATProto is meant to be decentralized (i.e, no single authority) and at the same time have rules that are enforced (purely by software, I'm not arguing that rules could be enforced socially) by any particular server?

You would need some form of distributed consensus mechanism, but then you either end up with some exclusive club to implement Paxos or you will need some blockchain-y solution, no?

Atproto and ActivityPub are both multi-polar governance, though AP more aggressively so (though we hope not for long as we pursue some lower-cost execution models for the appview). Consequently the realpolitik is, what's the business logic of the applications with the most users.