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461 points GavinAnderegg | 5 comments | | HN request time: 2.263s | source
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jazzyjackson ◴[] No.42150793[source]
I don't understand this critique:

> I’ll also add that the reason I’m a big fan of a ActivityPub solution like Mastodon is that it’s quite inexpensive to run your own complete stack unless you’re extremely famous. Hosting a Mastodon instance is a one-step process, and you then control everything. To get the same experience with atproto, you’ll need to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars a month, and even then you still don’t control everything as of today.

When you run a mastadon instance you're not mirroring the entire network, so its a bad comparison. I'm quite interested to find whether there will be niche relays that only index posts from certain pds (or provide a kind of community-chat discord competitor by being one server that hosts the PDSs of the community, and also provides the relay and appview for that community)

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1. GavinAnderegg ◴[] No.42150857[source]
If you want to run your own social platform, you can do so by running your own Mastodon instance. If you want to do the same with Bluesky, you simply can't at the moment. You'll either need to rely on other parts of the system that you don't control, or you'll need to control the whole system at great expense.
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2. jazzyjackson ◴[] No.42151021[source]
Aha, agreed that they are not offering anything for the use case of standalone communities. I wish they would, and I think the architecture is there for it, it's just that no one has used a relay in that way yet. I /might/ take it up myself in the next year or two, really I just want phpbb to have a second renassiance - special interest, user moderated forums like reddit but each community able to fork off to their own infrastructure if there's some schism re: moderation or otherwise.
3. programd ◴[] No.42153422[source]
You can run your own instance:

https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds

It's a weird install with a hybrid of Docker and systemd, but basically you run a script on a low-end Ubuntu VM and point your DNS at it and you're done. Far less resource intensive then Mastodon.

I wish they released an official k8s Helm chart or something, but it's not too hard to roll your own deployment.

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4. jazzyjackson ◴[] No.42153772[source]
I'm intrigued by this guide of setting it up manually behind nginx, I fall under "just don't like docker", but I figure it makes support easier if you only offer containerized deployment by default, at least everyone's machine is the same that way

https://benharri.org/bluesky-pds-without-docker/

5. GavinAnderegg ◴[] No.42165903[source]
A PDS allows you to store your own content and signing keys. It's not an instance in the same way as Mastodon, because Mastodon is fully contained. Your PDS still needs a Relay (which are quite expensive to run), and an App View (which currently only Bluesky runs) to be useful.