this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2025
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pardon my ignorance, but how is a de-centralized and de-federated online community bound to such annoyances?
For those who don't know, Bluesky isn't really federated. The only way to host a non-Bluesky instance required 1TB of storage in July 2024, and 5 TB of storage in Nov 2024. Could be way more than that now.
You basically have to be a company to federate into the ATProto (Bluesky) ecosystem. You can't just "stand up an instance".
Lots of detail: https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
(I know you've already realized that you were conflating Mastodon with Bluesky, I'm putting this here for others who come along so they can get the facts).
That’s not an outlandish amount of storage. You can get more than that for $200.
it keeps constantly growing by terabytes and needs to be fast too though. Means you're going to pay more than most private individuals are able to long-term just for the privilege of running that one component.
That's just if you want a complete copy. You can choose to store only parts of it, and retrieve what's missing from other relay servers when you need it.
seems to be a fairly recent development that isn't really documented much for now (not that running relays and some other components of the network is that well documented in general). Of course doing it that way also doesn't help with how centralized the whole thing is...
It's always been possible with the use of content addressing, it's just that they've been spending most time building out core services and are now focusing on making it cheaper to run.
Yeah, one of my main gripes with them is how much they talk about decentralization and how much it stays as vaporware while they focus on the more pressing issue of the moment.