I'm literally moving my mastodon instance by car right now
this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2025
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People have containerized (like literal shipping containers that comply with ISO 668 and its successors, not just software like Docker) data centers that can operate wherever they can hook up power. Put some antennas or satellite receivers on the outside, and you might be able to literally have services running from a moving vehicle or ship.
Like Pump up the Volume but instead of radio it's fedi!
Railcar. X-Files got that right. Move it across the country, tacked on the end of a freight or passenger train.
Is this really how it works? Is that per year? Hosted? Or do you own the software and can host it on your own?
There are many types of Bluesky servers. This post is about ATProto Relays, which consolidate all the data across the network into a single location. They are necessary for efficiency, but they are extremely expensive to run. Currently, there is only one ATProto relay, but there is an initiative to launch a third-party relay.
ATProto Relays, which consolidate all the data across the network into a single location. They are necessary for efficiency
How? And the fediverse works the other way around.
Basically, on ATProto, everyone stores their own data on a PDS (Personal Data Server). This includes every post, image, video, follow, like, block, etc. The relay crawls the open web for PDSs to consolidate into a single stream of data.
From here, services can build off of that single data stream without needing to do any crawling of their own.
Of course, this does give the operator of the relay a lot of power. If they were to block your PDS, then only services relying on a different relay can access your data. This is especially why it is important that there exist independent third-party relays, but no one has taken up the mantle yet.
The PDS design is a nice approach to making AT Proto distributed. But, the way they chose to operate relays means that the protocol requires massive investment to run.
The absolute minimum spend for a node right now, even with Bluesky still growing, is something like tens of thousands of dollars per year. If Bluesky does become the next Twitter, it will probably be $100k+ per year to run a relay. That means a company could run a relay, maybe a university could run one, but it's way out of the reach of anyone but the richest of individual users.
Can't someone theoretically make an Activitypub relay which hosts information from all private instances that federate with it? Like, how is this (AT Protocol) better
They already exist, they range from smaller webring like relays to ones that tie the major nodes together.
Neat! Does that mean there's an ActivityPub equivalent to the ATProto Firehose?
Not to the same extent, part of the point of AT is that everything shares the same feed, while the AP relays only offer the view of co-operating servers.
Now Mastodon does offer its own streaming API that lets you see every post on a given server, and at least the fedibuzz relay offers that as well, so if you use that API endpoint you'll see every post of every server it knows about in real time.
In addition, it's estimated to current cost about $500 a month just to store the contents of a relay server. this doesn't include network or computer cost. this will only get more expensive and lead to big businesses being the only players. relays, being the "Post office" of bluesky, have the power to suppress whatever they don't like.
ActivityPub really is "for the people".
But can ActivityPub scale?
Can AT Proto? It goes both ways.
In terms of infrastructure, Bluesky does seem to be capable with keeping up with the current level of 5,000,000 posts per day by pouring money into their relay. What I'd like to know is the cost per user of Bluesky compared to a centralized service like Threads.
I think one of the bigger issues with Bluesky scaling is moderation. Mastodon admins only have to deal with moderating their own instance, while ATProto labeling services can receive reports from any and all Bluesky users. So far, most people who attempted to launch an independent replacement for Bluesky Moderation Service have failed to keep up with the volume of incoming reports. Usually, they have to narrow their scope and focus on very specific issues, like Laelaps, Asuka's Anti-Transphobia Field, Blacksky Moderation, and AI Mod. However, as Bluesky grows, I even expect them to be unable to keep up.
I feel like bluesky is just an attempt by a lot of institutional powers that lost a platform when Elon took over Twitter to make what essentially is a clone of Twitter circa 2018.
What a lot of people forget is that, even before Elon, Twitter had become super toxic. It was basically some pseduo-progressive echo chamber dominated by lazy journalists, virtue signaling politicians, and toxic hot takes divorced from reality. The moderation system was just selectively enforced based on whatever Twitter's SF HQ thought was relevant that day.
I like the idea of anyone being able to spin up their own server and have a space for discourse. While it can be dangerous, I'd strongly argue that having a centralized private organization deciding what is/isn't acceptable is a lot more so.
Fun fact: ~~Bluesky was originally started at Twitter.~~
Kinda - the dev team was external and had already started the project when Twitter offered funding for an open protocol based version of Twitter, and selected the current team to do it (so Jack could avoid moderation duties, lol)
It's how forums used to be, and it worked just fine. You had to go out of your way to find communities dedicated to bigotry instead of getting forcibly pipelined into them just for joining a funny cat image group.
Fuck. It's so true to man. I literally grew up on the Internet. I could not imagine that now.
I think that what a lot of people don't realize is that BlueSky is federated in order to make their corporate infrastructure stronger and easier for them to operate.
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