[jacob2161]

Anyone else is also free to run these services (app views, relays) and a few people already are doing this.

An atproto PDS is like a structured-data blog hosted on a web server. Anyone is free to index, relay, and render the data.

[evbogue]

Yes, and running these things is prohibitively difficult such as I've only witnessed two full index attempts and no alternative plc directories.

Bluesky should make these easier so your average Linux admin can attempt to host the full stack, as opposed to only being able to host a PDS. This would eliminate the criticism about Bluesky's design.

[anon7000]

AT Proto isn’t really supposed to be about individuals self hosting the whole thing. The system is supposed to be global, distributed, and shared, not isolated to one person self-hosting the whole stack. One person should be able to host a resource and connect it to the network (esp to host their own data). It’s just a different design goal compared to full-stack self-hosting. Fundamentally speaking, you can’t run Twitter at scale on a home laptop. But if lots of people band together their resources by hosting distributed microservices, they can self host it together. That’s what AT Proto is trying to solve

[jazzyjackson]

If it was more DNSy it could be hierarchal. I should be able to run my own stack and treat is like an RSS feed, subscribed to the various domains and individuals I'm interested in. Larger (but not huge) players could create plc directories of users and various aggregated feeds. Why have the expectation to host the global firehouse just because you want to customize how relays and appviews work?

[culi]

Agreed. If you wanna be able to host the whole stack you should just use Mastodon

[bnewbold]

If you want a service which indexes every post in the public network, including from folks you don't follow, that is just going to require resources. I think $200/month for a full-network index (as zepplin does) is very reasonable and approachable for organized groups without external funding. Many Mastodon instances cost more than that, and provide a must smaller scope of indexing.

If you want a small scaled down setup for just a small community, which still interoperates with the full network but doesn't have a complete network, there are setups like AppViewLite, which can run on, eg, an old laptop at home: https://github.com/alnkesq/AppViewLite

Personally, I don't think individualist self-hosting is a necessary or helpful goal for indexing the network. Most humans are not interested in spending the time or learning the skills to do this, even if it was as easy as setting up a self-hosted blog with RSS. I think small collectives (orgs, coops, communities, neighborhoods, companies, etc) exist and can fill this role.

Regardless, this is moving the discussion, which was about whether it was possible to decentralize each component the network, not whether it was pragmatic for individuals to self-host the whole thing.

[ttiurani]

> I think $200/month for a full-network index (as zeppelin does) is very reasonable and approachable for organized groups without external funding.

I didn't know about these recent attempts, they're impressive for sure. However they write[1] about zeppelin:

"The cost to run this is about US $200/mo, primarily due to the 16 terabytes of storage it currrently uses"

So when you here give that $200/mo cost as a price point for "organized groups", you are forecasting that the cost of storage will go down as fast as the BlueSky data size grows? At what rate right now is the data size growing? Because the last numbers I saw were something like 2TB, so it being already 16TB sounds like $200/mo is not going to be enough very soon.

[1] https://whtwnd.com/futur.blue/3ls7sbvpsqc2w

[dingnuts]

> I think $200/month for a full-network index (as zepplin does) is very reasonable and approachable for organized groups without external funding.

That's crazy cheap! Everybody on HN should be able to run one of these, just cancel your Claude Code Max subscription

All kidding aside, that's incredibly cost effective and heartening to read. I expected the cost of running a relay to be much higher.

[bnewbold]

"A Full-Network Relay for $34/month" https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lo7a2a4qxg2l

[evbogue]

> Most humans are not interested in spending the time or learning the skills to do this[...]

Well, this is exactly my point. ATProto's infrastructure is too hard for most humans, and that is the reason for the centralization complaint.

The team's goal should be to make it easier, so the complaint goes away.

[jacob2161]

I agree there's a lot of room for improvement in making it easier.

But certain things like full-network relays/app views just have inherent bandwidth/storage/compute costs associated with them but it's definitely something a non-profit (like Internet Archive) could easily afford to do.

The PLC service could likely be hosted for ~$40/mo.