the reason there arent relays is that theyre expensive to run (150$+ a month, if you rent, and the cost seems to scale linearily with the amount of users on the network), i saw a blog about someone who hosted one briefly (https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/entries/Notes on Running a Full-Network atproto Relay (July 2024), and it isnt even that hard to setup, it’s mostly just the cost.
Also, relay’s aren’t technically needed, you could make an appview that pulls from pds’s directly.
As I mentioned above, I don’t feel strongly about Bluesky winning, I just don’t like misinformation. (I also have other things I care about more that take up what little free time I have for tech stuff already, so I’m not going to undertake something major just to prove a point.) If there’s really a fundamental problem with AT Proto and how it can be used, Doctorow’s post should have made that explicit.
I did find a (more recent) post that goes into detail about what’s lacking, and I’ve edited my original post accordingly.
