Is it currently possible to completely self-host ATProto and interact with BlueSky users?
Is it currently possible to completely self-host ATProto and interact with BlueSky users?
I don't actually want to do this right now, but I do want to know if it's really decentralized yet. Completely looks like it means each of:
- A client ✅
- A personal data server ✅
- A relay ❓
- Labelers ✅
- Feed generators ✅
It looks like the relay might be the bottleneck. If I'm understanding the protocol correctly, a relay could consume less than the whole network so it doesn't have to be ridiculously expensive to operate, but I'm not finding examples of people doing it.
ive been asking about this for a long time. ive yet to be presented with a non-bluesky controlled relay instance. this is a lynch-pin of the protocol and prevents true federation.
happy to be proven wrong someday, but bluesky is just twitter with user-contolled nodes. they can decide to remove nodes at their whim.
This is a good breakdown. A firehose relay takes TB's of storage and is not practical for self-hosting, and AppView isn't hostable yet: https://alice.bsky.sh/post/3laega7icmi2q
A firehose relay takes TB's of storage
which is similar nonsense which ActivityPub has with replicating whole datasets everywhere.. cept its one company controlling the whole shebang. its a failure of design.
My friend, it's not nonsense, it's basically how decentralised communication has to work if you want any reasonable level of recency & history in the data.
Usenet was basically the original and I believe a modern news provider requires something like 50 petabytes of storage to run a 10 year data retention service
That's enlightening. It links to an article about self hosting a relay, which explains that, as I suspected, a relay does not have to mirror the entire network. It also seems that using a relay at all is an optional optimization.
It looks like the BlueSky AppView is not (yet?) open source. I wonder why nobody has built an alternative yet.
For better or for worse, this fragmentation on the fediverse (which causes the missing replies and posts in smaller instances) is what allows fediverse instances to be hosted by smaller actors and one of the most important reasons I feel the fediverse can and will survive (regardless of how popular other services become)
It feels quite unrealistic that a hobbyist or even small organisations would ever be able to fully host bluesky. Unless I’m fundamentally misunderstanding something about how it works.
Can relays be lazy, be used by a limited amount of users and just stream those users activities plus what they follow? If that is possible then I guess you’d be losing the benefit of algorithmic feeds, though… or again I fundamentally don’t understand something about the protocol.