It looks like the relay might be the bottleneck. If I'm understanding the protocol correctly, a relay could consume less than the whole network so it doesn't have to be ridiculously expensive to operate, but I'm not finding examples of people doing it.

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[–] surfrock66@lemmy.world 10 points 23 hours ago (6 children)

This is a good breakdown. A firehose relay takes TB's of storage and is not practical for self-hosting, and AppView isn't hostable yet: https://alice.bsky.sh/post/3laega7icmi2q

[–] pablo@lemm.ee 1 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

For better or for worse, this fragmentation on the fediverse (which causes the missing replies and posts in smaller instances) is what allows fediverse instances to be hosted by smaller actors and one of the most important reasons I feel the fediverse can and will survive (regardless of how popular other services become)

It feels quite unrealistic that a hobbyist or even small organisations would ever be able to fully host bluesky. Unless I’m fundamentally misunderstanding something about how it works.

Can relays be lazy, be used by a limited amount of users and just stream those users activities plus what they follow? If that is possible then I guess you’d be losing the benefit of algorithmic feeds, though… or again I fundamentally don’t understand something about the protocol.

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