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Top-level
 A frequent way of describing Bluesky's decentralization, including by Bluesky's team, is "it's like a bunch of blogs (Personal Data Stores), and then the relay/appview/etc pieces are like search engines" This is a reasonable starting point for thinking about things, so let's run with it. 513 comments
While most people would argue that blogs and websites are open, few would argue that *Google* is open. So this is a curious place to begin thinking, and yet structually, it is actually quite apt. PDS'es are like blogs, the rest is like Google. But relays/appviews/etc do a lot *more* than Google. Relays, AppViews, etc don't just index information. Blogs and their interactions are generally slow-moving, but social media is direct and responsive. Notifications and fast interactions are key. So search engines, yes, but we should also think of these components of doing much more. But let's stay on this blog/search engine analogy for a while before we unpack what it means on a *technical* level, which is interesting. Let's analyze for the moment from a power dynamics level. Building a web search engine is actually pretty easy these days, you can do so with off-the-shelf tools. And yet there are only a couple of search engines *really*, Google and Bing (DDG mostly uses Bing). And yet the information is right there. *Anyone* could run their own engine. Why don't they? Furthermore there is an interesting connection between blogs and social media: the death of blogs + feed aggregation directly aligns with the death of social media. How many of you were around for the birth and awkward death of blog engine feeds? Because I was! Oh, remember Google Reader?  @lopezsanchez @cwebber me too. But they are definitely at the margin. Many blogs died in that transition. Feed readers are also simple, and in fact they were even easy to self host, even on the desktop! But Google Reader came in and was such a good design that everyone used it. When it went away, blogs were still *there*. But blogging as a *syndication medium* died. One big player left, and it's gone. This was sad for me especially; my favorite medium on the internet ever was webcomics. Webcomics still exist, sort of, but the loss of independent publishing and aggregation meant that they had to change to survive. The shape of webcomics started to get shaped to the shape of Twitter's image box. This may seem like an enormous aside, but it isn't. The big sell currently is that "you don't need to run a relay because you can run your own PDS!" but as I have illustrated here, the distribution and syndication power dynamics matter a lot. So. It isn't enough to self-host your own PDS. Whether or not people can run their own relays/appviews/etc actually matters *a lot* if we want this stuff to survive. So, can we? How hard is it to run your own AppView/Relay/etc? Today, there is only one real organization running a Relay that really matters or an AppView that people use for anything other than fun aggregation of statistics. Nothing that resembles meaningful decentralization of the network. It's all run by one company: Bluesky. But could we change that? People are trying; most notably alice has done some great work recently: https://alice.bsky.sh/post/3laega7icmi2q So now someone *can* run their own Relay (not the AppView yet, but maybe soon), and we're getting a sense of the cost and scale. This is good news; we didn't know before. In fact we also have an idea of the rate of growth. Approximately 4 months prior, @bnewbold.net posted an article detailing how to run a Bluesky relay: https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/entries/Notes%20on%20Running%20a%20Full-Network%20atproto%20Relay%20(July%202024) This is great. We need more people trying to do so to get a sense of how decentralized things can be. Just focusing on storage, in July @bnewbold.net estimated the amount of storage expected to run a Bluesky relay is approx 1 terabyte. In just 4 months at start of this month (November), alice estimates nearly 5 terabytes. This is a fast growth rate and this is *before* the big post-election influx. I tried estimating how much this would cost; as a lazy approximation I dumped a 5 terabyte machine into seeing what Linode would cost to self-host, and it was approximately 55k a year: https://bsky.app/profile/dustyweb.bsky.social/post/3lah5n3kld42q That's a lazy estimate, but that's also what many people make in the US every year However @bnewbold pointed out, correctly!, that there were cheaper options available. If we used even Linode's block storage, it would be cheaper (but still expensive) for the storage component, and this is true https://bsky.app/profile/dustyweb.bsky.social/post/3lah5n3kld42q In fact @bnewbold and alice had gotten the server down to just close to $200/month in their estimate, much much cheaper than I had, by choosing a dedicated server plan. Much cheaper! But there's a problem though; that's cheap because you've got a server that has a dedicated disk... Even if we look at the dedicated hosting provider that @bnewbold provided in June and scale the cost to the pre-election storage requirements, we are adding on a massive amount of cost every month, over $400/month more.  But worse, we have reached the limits of what is possible to do with a dedicated server. We *have to* move to abstracted storage from this point forward because we're starting to hit the limits of what's offered for cheap dedicated storage on one machine. And this number will only grow, and as said previously, is growing at an enormous rate.  @cwebber honestly blogs are a more 'credible exit' than a bsky pds .. I have spent a lot of time focusing on the cost of storage, but storage is only one cost required. These estimates have been done so far against servers that *nobody is actually using*. The cost of servers that people are using will be much higher, because more needs to happen than just store things. And that is not even to mention the challenges with administrating, dealing with takedown requests, illegal content, etc, which are probably much more serious. Let's take a break, the analysis of server costs is boring and I don't like doing it, and I'm sure people will throw numbers at me of the absolute race-to-the-bottom hosting numbers they can find to store and run all this stuff, but really that's not interesting to me. Let's do a comparison. Remember that the idea of "fully self-hosting" on Bluesky/ATProto at this point is primarily abstract; nobody is really doing it. But of course there's a place where tens of thousands of people are running their own servers for millions of users, and that's the fediverse/ActivityPub. As said, tens of thousands of people are self-hosting *today*. Fediverse software doesn't just scale up, it scales *down*. GotoSocial is cheap enough on resources where you can run it for family and friends on a raspberry pi or spare laptop you have sitting around. Now you're hitting the point in this thread where some of you may be thinking "aha! this is where Christine is saying that the fediverse/activitypub are awesome and atproto is terrible!" you have NO IDEA HOW MUCH I CRITICIZE THE FEDIVERSE ALL THE TIME, I do it all the time, and will later here The fediverse has a lot of flaws. Oh trust me, we're gonna get to that. But comparison-wise: what I mean to say is that architectural decisions matter, and scaling up isn't the only thing that's important, *scaling down matters too*. If you care about decentralization, anyway. Now look, we're about 1/3 of the way done here, there's a lot more to say, and a lot more said in my article, it's about 24 pages long if you print it out. This is because in the age of TikTok I somehow have decided to model myself after David Foster Wallace, sorry "Consider the Fediverse" I guess But now, I will break for lunch. Enjoy your intermission because I will be back. We still have to get through the remaining 2/3 of the analysis, after all. ======= LUNCH BREAK HERE =======  @cwebber Thanks for doing this, it's an amazing analysis and contextualization! Okay I am back from lunch, time to resume my analysis thread for "How decentralized is bluesky really?" https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/ I have been receiving a lot of notifications, I am not reading any of them until I finish with this so bear with me, BEAR WITH ME, we're gonna make it through And before we make it any further can I say that I watched a nice medley of David Bowie and Cher singing, and it was so lovely https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPlN8RBP-Ws @mlemweb said "of course it's very heteronormative despite having two queer coded icons on the stage and ISN'T THAT THE WAY I guess But where was I? Oh yes. We had talked about why PDS'es aren't enough (blog/google analogy), relative costs of hosting things on ATProto vs ActivityPub, etc etc But we haven't gotten into the really interesting parts which are the structural analysis stuff, so let's move onto that Now you may be saying, "Christine, this is really unfair, because you're looking at ActivityPub servers which are only dealing with a small amount of the network, what if it were an ActivityPub mega-node? What are the costs THEN huh?" and "What if we hosted just PART of ATProto?" What then INDEED ATProto is not designed for the Relay and AppViews to only hold part of the network, not *really*, and ActivityPub is. We'll get to this in a moment. But Bluesky actually has good justification for this! I will defend it insofar as Bluesky was making a serious *design decision* Remember the directive that Bluesky was given: develop a decentralized protocol which Twitter can adopt. That informs a lot of things, and has meant that Bluesky was really very ready for this moment! If you're an ex-X-Twitter user then by god, you're going to be amazed! It's just like Twitter! This informs some other things: But here's the other thing. People have trouble with the fediverse! All those decentralization decisions get in the way, my god, you've got to choose a server, search doesn't work well (actually it could but it's a cultural thing, different topic), and worst of all: Sometimes you DON'T SEE REPLIES!   @cwebber Have you already publish It? I Guess this is the one Where you explain if it'll be posible a federation between AT & ActivityPub  @cwebber FWIW, there are over 1000 independent PDSes right now, and the number seems to grow at about 400-500 a month. The practical effect is different since the means to control that data beyond exporting without funky command line tools rests with the AppView, which is still extremely centralized. edit: a list + count https://github.com/mary-ext/atproto-scraping   @cwebber That's rather bad. Ideally a social media node would have a constant storage need, not one which needs to scale with the amount of users, the media, etc. Maybe ephemeral services like IRC were not such a bad idea to begin with. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The conclusion that we need big billionaire companies, just to fill our "need" to post cat videos, is a little bit silly. BUT when considering climate change, that fits the picture. We live in absurd times. @cwebber Relevant discussion from earlier: https://bsky.app/profile/why.bsky.team/post/3lbjdux6ubc2f Non-archival relays solve some problems, introduce others. @cwebber what is in the 5TB? The whole history? Is media included?  @cwebber I use RSS to subscribe to my webcomics, but there's a surprisng lot where I can't  @cwebber Yep! I often cite that as an example of what I call "de-invention"  Except RSS still isn't dead. After all, it is the foundation upon which podcasting was built. |
Gregory's Server
In fact ATProto's own tutorial even says "Think of our app like a Google": https://atproto.com/guides/applications
And indeed this is a good way to think about things. But it doesn't seem so bad, because we have Personal Data Stores like blogs, so probably things are fine, right?