This is a pretty great, long form post about the structure of Bluesky, and how it’s largely kinda pretending to be decentralized at the moment. I’m not trying to make a dig at it. I’ve enjoyed the platform myself for a while, but it’s good to learn more about how it actually works.
This article was shared on Mastodon via its author here.
I thought it takes that much storage to run a relay, not an instance. (Which Bluesky calls a “Personal Data Store.”)
Maybe this is just my ignorance showing, but this seems like a really archaic way to design something like this in 2024. Dump all the data into a central repository and then have clients pull from that?
Bluesky (well, atproto, bluesky is the twitter clone running on atproto as a demo app) doesn’t actually have instances in the mastodon sense, it’s a more modular design for better scaling (because it was designed from the start to replace twitter)
Here’s a good article with illustrations https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers
