[steveklabnik]

For sure. If you just want to host your own data, you can do that. A PDS for you and maybe some friends is very small and cheap to host.

[nightpool]

My understanding though is that having a PDS on its own is useless without an AppView to collect the data from the relay? Or am I misunderstanding the architecture here? https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/federation-archit...

[steveklabnik]

I'm talking about the case where you wanted to run your own PDS and use all of the other infrastructure being run by Bluesky.

If you fully want your own copy of everything, then you'd want to run a copy of everything. But you don't have to. It really depends on what your goals are. That's why the post is about the maximal scenario. "Just your own PDS" is the minimalist scenario. But I think it's the one that makes sense for 95% of users who want to self-host.

[nightpool]

Right, and I'm saying "surely there must be a middle ground between "using all of Bluesky's infrastructure" and "having a 4.5tb copy of every post ever made on the network""

[lisowski]

What exactly would that be?

I feel like the middle ground your talking about could be just a feed?

A feed is: a server that consumes the firehose and decided on whether to store posts, when loaded in the app it returns some post to create a feed

So essentially you only store references to part of the network rather than storing the whole thing

[jonstaab]

consider the nostr protocol