Archived version, for posterity.
Take note Bluesky fans: Your “benevolent” controlling nonprofit can quickly become a for-profit if enough cash is thrown at the governing board…
Sort of, but not quite…It’s intentionally done in a way that in no way scales well and quickly becomes cost prohibitive for small players (not just individuals) to run a server because it requires an insane amount of data and bandwidth. So in practice you can only run a server if you’re willing to throw a shitload of money after server capacity.
That’s not true at all actually, running a PDS uses about as many resources as a regular personal blog HTML server (as it doesn’t do anything but serve up your signed posts), and running a relay with only the couple thousand people that have decided to host their own PDSes is home self-hostable.
Good blog post here clearing some stuff up: https://whtwnd.com/alexia.bsky.cyrneko.eu/3l727v7zlis2i
Yes, you can run a PDS, but while it might be true that you can self-host a relay with a couple thousand people (I didn’t find anything about this in that blog post but I don’t see why you couldn’t), using a limited relay like that would mean this would not be a full/real instance of Bluesky (unless you disconnect from the rest of the network, but then why even bother)
So let’s examine the problems with relays here:
After recent growth, our out-of-box relay implementation (bigsky) requires on the order of 16 TBytes of fast NVMe disk, and that will grow proportional to content in the network.
Core Bluesky engineer’s blogpost
In July this was “only” about 1TB, in mid November around 5TB, and now 16TB? That’s insane growth if you want to self-host that, and will get expensive really fast really quickly, especially since fast storage is important here. I don’t think many individuals have the resources to self host this just for themselves.
Another critical problem is that when more people self-host relays this has the wonderful side-effect of increasing the necessary computation power and network use, because Bluesky scales O(n^2 ) , which is really bad if you want anything close to a decentralized network.
So yes, it is true that it scales down terribly, this is by design. It’s a step up from Twitter, because this time multiple corporations can control it instead of one, but it isn’t that good either.
