This is the first time I’m seeing a way to host a full Bluesky network, I think. It seems like a big step towards full federation beyond appviews and personal data servers.
This is the first time I’m seeing a way to host a full Bluesky network, I think. It seems like a big step towards full federation beyond appviews and personal data servers.
Yeah but unlike activity pub, atproto/bluesky demands each self hosted relay process a massive amount of data to participate, it is incredibly impractical and costly to envision scaling up, bluesky’s self hosting is essentially made to be a curiousity rich developers with access to powerful hardware try out as a hobbiest project and write a blog post about, not a serious general use case for everyone.
The idea of course is make it so nerds can technically do it, but the bulk of users can’t and won’t.
The strategy is convince the nerds you are giving them access to the future and that average people aren’t ready for it, and than never actually provide that future since nerds stop advocating for it because a corporation handed them a tiny scrap and that was enough to write a good techy diy blog post about.
Bluesky is the past desperately trying to convince you it is the future, don’t fall for it.
Yes, and I’ve been yelling at them about the problem of scaling down for a while, since the same “relay” service needs to be both a firehose and a full mirror. This requirement (and thus scalability) of running a relay is becoming a big problem even for the main devs. According to them however you can mitigate this to a reasonable amount for a home lab (~8 cores, 16gb ram, ~2Tb ssdl) if you simply don’t store any backlog and just retransmit posts https://bsky.app/profile/why.bsky.team/post/3lbjdux6ubc2f
This is what they’re doing internally to manage the load and are also working on implementing relay sharding/scoping to let you just index a small slice of the network, which should eliminate the problem. https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/discussions/3036 and here’s someone implementing a proof of concept third party version https://bsky.app/profile/pet.bun.how/post/3lbwnx2rxxs2o
It’s true that the main devs’ priorities are building the large scale parts first and then worrying about downscaling, the whole point was always to replace twitter and work at a similar scale, which requires hard tradeoffs. I do worry that they’ll run out of money before they can do the work to let the ecosystem become sustainable by itself.
But I have faith (for now) because they have people I know from when they worked on secure-ssb and dat protcols, which are truly decentralized but never took off for other reasons.
“But I have faith (for now) because they have people I know from when they worked on secure-ssb and dat protcols, which are truly decentralized but never took off for other reasons.”
The modern corporation is precisely defined as a structure of ownership perpendicular to ethics, one of the prime reasons for this is to progressively nullify this specific category of “there are good people in the room” defenses against extreme unsustainable extraction of profit at catastrophic consequences for everybody but shareholders.
Yes, this is the strongest argument against it and the biggest flaw. They keep saying in interviews that they are treating their future selves as adversaries and they do open source most everything but I would be a lot happier if the protocol development was spun off into a separate org from the for profit service. If it dies, this will be what killed it. But I hope they make it (by it I mean the tools for everyone else to make the ecosystem).
I’m mildly concerned about this as well.
You don’t need to access information via the relay. You can have a client get information directly from PDSes or Appviews that don’t get their information from the relay.