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Bluesky and Wide Decentralization
Contrary to current perceptions, Bluesky can not be widely decentralized because full independence on AT Protocol simply costs too much. This is not something that can be fixed. It is based on the inherent architecture of the protocol.
All ATProto components rely on some very expensive network resources, accordingly there will never be very many, making these resources points of centralization.
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Bluesky and Wide Decentralization (cont.)
With Mastodon/ActivityPub independent service cost relates to the number of instance users, so small decentralized services are very low cost.
With Bluesky/ATProto some components can be distributed fairly well, like users storing their own data, but other components, like full scale relays, necessarily have a cost proportional to the number of users on the whole network, making small and medium size services expensive.
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@mastodonmigration
Expensive?
”full-network atproto relay on a $4.20/mo VPS”
https://bsky.app/profile/bad-example.com/post/3mfkrfvy3ok2u
@joborg@mastodon.social @mastodonmigration@mastodon.online that's for a partial relay although they did a switcharoo and now the really expensive to run service is the AppView. Blacksky pays a budget hosting company something like $13,000k/year for their AppView that wasn't yet even in production last I checked IIRC.
@vetehinen @mastodonmigration full-network means full network, as far as I understand it.
Storing and indexing the data that you’re interested in is what’s expensive, but luckily that scales with the number of your users rather than the number of ATproto users. (Filtering the events that your users are interested in also scales with the entire network, but just like with that relay you only touch each event once.)
@joborg@mastodon.social @mastodonmigration@mastodon.online as was mentioned elsewhere here in the thread if you're doing what Blacksky is doing, trying to offer complete set of independent infra for the microblog use case you need to handle all the Bluesky users in addition to all the Blacksky users though. That's why they have a small amount of users on their own but still massive needs for resources.
