this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2025
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Were only one instance exist or did I miss something?
As I understand it, the protocol has the ability to decentralize built in. But the technical requirements are prohibitively high to the point only large businesses or corps could afford to do it. I also believe (someone correct me) the company hasn’t switched on the functionality yet.
Last heard (a few months ago) the cost is in storage. The protocol isn’t too complicated now, but it generates a shit ton of data, and IIRC you need a minimum of 3 copies.
Storage is cheap whwn it comes to webhosting and 3 replicas is honestly not much when it comes to enterprise standards. I think cloud storage providers like backblaze keep something like 9 copies of data across different mediums
my mom has always told me that I had the potential to work at NASA. but the requirements are prohibitively high
I believe in you!
all you need is a work ethic and a time machine
Maybe you remember PDS federation not being open for a while, but it's open now.
Running a public appview can be very expensive, but they're working on making it cheaper to run one with a limited scope.
The biggest thing is that you need to be manually authorized by them for federation. They will only ever federate with servers that arent serious enough competition to lead to democratization of the overall network.
No, PDS federation is fully open now.
They're also actively supporting development of 3rd party appviews and relays.
The power dynamic is still 1000000:1 they can do whatever they want and you will have to follow. If they defederate you, there is no value in your self hosted instance.
Partially - something running independent infrastructure like Whitewind (blogging on atproto) will still work just like before (it's easier for them to run it independently because you don't need a full network view, just pull in the posts from the user's PDS for standalone display)
When the work to make appviews easier to run makes it more practical this will be less of a risk.
Nope, it's 100% centralized.
It's 100% centralized, but with the ability to be decentralized. Sorta like Threads before they started federating
Sure, but until it actually gets used significantly in that way, we might as well just say it's centralized.
The "ability" to decentralize has costs that scale quadratically. So in every practical sense, it cannot be decentralized. At best it could have a few servers that participate.
No, it doesn't scale "quadratically". That's what going viral on Mastodon does to a small instance, not on bluesky. Pretty much everything scales linearly. The difference is certain components handle a larger fraction of the work (appview and relay).
Both a bluesky appview and a Mastodon instance scales by the size of the userbase which it interacts with. Mastodon likes to imagine that the userbase will always be consistent, but it isn't. Anything viewed by a large part of the whole Mastodon network forces the host to serve the entirety of the network and all its interactions. So does a bluesky appview, in just the same way, but they acknowledge this upfront.
Meanwhile, you CAN host a bluesky PDS account host and have your traffic scale only by the rate of your users' activity + number of relays you push these updates to. Going viral doesn't kill your bandwidth.
I can't speak to how traffic costs and mastodon works, but this article explains how having multiple blue skies federating with each other scales quadratically. https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/ it is very thorough.
That's written assuming the edge case of EVERYBODY running a full relay and appview, and that's not per-node scaling cost but global scaling cost.
Because they don't scale like that, global cost is geometric instead (for every full relay and appview, there's one full copy with linear scaling to network activity), and each server only handles the cost for serving their own users' activity (plus firehose/jetstream subscription & filtering for those who need it)
For Mastodon instance costs, try ask the former maintainers of https://botsin.space/
I'm sad that bots in space had to spin down, but there are still bots on Mastodon. One server quitting didn't take everything down.
The part where if a mastodon post gets popular, it has to serve that to everyone makes sense because it's kind of like a website. Maybe there could be a CDN like Cloudflare that a mastodon server could use to cache responses?
The part about Bluesky that doesn't sound good to me is "to send a message to one user is to send it to all". Wouldn't this be crazy with even 100 servers for 10000 users, vs 2 servers with 5000 each? Not sure how the math works but it doesn't look good if they have to duplicate so much traffic.
This is a little bit more black and white compared with the other responses. 🙈
I think their initial selling point was that Eventually©®™ Bluesky would federate with the rest of the Fediverse.
Is anybody really surprised that a social media corporation didn't make it their utmost priority to allow their userbase to connect out of their proprietary platform?
They never said they'd do so natively with other protocols - but they support Bridgy, so you already can do that.
Interesting how other instances of the fediverse have no such restrictions. It's almost as if they want to make it as difficult as possible so that people just don't federate.
There's literally no restrictions other than simple rate limiting, which you can ask for exceptions for.
I don't know a Mastodon/lemmy server which wouldn't rate limit new peers
I dont see this in the article.
You can easily host your own instance with a simple docker stack.
I dont know of any public instances except the main but I also havent searched.
you can host your own PDS, but everyone is still using the same appview