The fact that there is still to this date no alternative Bluesky server that can be used to register seems to indicate that they put the entry cost to federation too high.
If the federation is only theoretical and never happens in reality, it’s not really federated.
The fact that there is still to this date no alternative Bluesky server
This is true, but why would someone go out of their way to do this when all data ends up in the same firehose?
Three circumstances:
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Domain name federation: Currently live and implemented across the site, in fact I’ve done this.
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PDS (personal data) federation: You would ideally only host your own PDS to host your own data.
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Backup: You want to host a backup of all Firehose data for access by others (very valid case, but you’re paying to just host data that’s already available)
Any other circumstance it’s going to cost the host money for effectively no usecase. Sure people can do it but why would the host pay hosting fees? If Bluesky went down a path of introducing advertisements or became a pile of shit then there’s true incentive to host your own independent PDS/Relay/App View. I generally think people just aren’t understanding federation across Bluesky because it truly is a lot more complicated complicated than ActivityPub (some pros / some cons).
Sure people can do it but why would the host pay hosting fees?
Fediverse admins pay fees for their instances. BlueSky requiring such high fees to run your own instance seems just a hidden way to prevent people from actually creating federated instances.
If Bluesky went down a path of introducing advertisements or became a pile of shit then there’s true incentive to host your own independent PDS/Relay/App View.
So if tomorrow Elon Musk buys BlueSky, the only alternative for people to keep using the AT Protocol and stay federated with BlueSky without being under Musk’s control would be to be running that very expensive relay?
Fediverse admins pay fees for their instances.
Yes but they have communities within their instance. With ATProto everything is published to the protocol so there’s no inherent internal community, the instance is just the infrastructure at that point, not a community.
Also in terms of expense I’ve seen it’s around $250 / month which equivalent to larger Lemmy instances, I think programming dev was around this price point so it’s not absurdly large. But it is at the point of why run this if I’m just hosting infrastructure and not creating a community.
I have been reading that some people are working on subdomain @'s (equivalent to Lemmy username@domain) within ATProto, which leads to more community interaction, but I think that’s still handled under the Domain federation not the PDS / Relay federation.
