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Are we decentralized yet?

(arewedecentralizedyet.online)
487 points Bogdanp | 6 comments | 30 Aug 25 19:26 UTC | HN request time: 0.925s | source | bottom
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d4mi3n ◴[30 Aug 25 19:39 UTC] No.45077410[source]▶
Neat! I'm not surprised at the findings here. BlueSky (for the average user) is pretty much a drop in replacement for Twitter.

Despite the smaller total numbers in Mastadon, it's great to see that the ecosystem seems to be successfully avoiding centralization like we've seen in the AT-Proto ecosystem.

I suspect that the cost of running AT proto servers/relays is prohibitive for smaller players compared to a Mastadon server selectively syndicating with a few peers, but I say this with only a vague understanding of the internals of both of these ecosystems.

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kyle-rb ◴[30 Aug 25 21:27 UTC] No.45078151[source]▶
Running a PDS server for yourself and a few friends is not very expensive afaik, but there's also not much benefit to doing so, because the point of the PDS is to have a clean separation between your own data and the rest of the network.

The expensive things in ATProto are the Relay (crawls/listens to PDSs to produce the firehose) and the AppView (keeps a DB of all posts/likes/etc to serve users' requests). Expensive at scale anyway; if you want your own small network for hosting non-Bluesky posts (like WhiteWind's longer character limit), the event volume will be manageable.

For a lot of stuff though ATProto is built in a way that you shouldn't have to host your own; you can implement your own algorithmic feed that reads from the Bluesky Relay's firehose, or your own frontend that still gets data from the Bluesky AppView.

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danabramov ◴[30 Aug 25 21:40 UTC] No.45078223[source]▶
Running a relay is not expensive anymore (it used to be), with recent changes it's about $30/mo. Running an AppView that ingests all ongoing Bluesky traffic (and puts it into database) is more expensive ($300/mo currently) but if you were happy with a partial view of the network, you could get it down by a lot.
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1. yoshuaw ◴[31 Aug 25 00:22 UTC] No.45079222[source]▶
> Running a relay is not expensive anymore [...]

$30/mo is $360/yr, which for most people is a prohibitively large sum of money. That would make Bluesky access more expensive than even the most expensive Netflix subscription; closer to the cost of a cellular plan.

For comparison: for my Mastodon account I pay $5/mo or $60/yr to a dedicated hosting provider. This puts it in the same ballpark as paying for a private email host or a VPN subscription.

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2. verdverm ◴[31 Aug 25 00:35 UTC] No.45079285[source]▶
The PDS is closer to the Mastodon account and will run you the same amount of money. The relay or appview is what takes the load when one of your posts goes viral, whereas in mastadon your $5 VPs has to handle that spike in traffic. Been several a story about how AP has DDoS'd a small server because there is no equivalent to the relay
3. danabramov ◴[31 Aug 25 00:41 UTC] No.45079318[source]▶
This makes sense, but a Relay isn't something you'd expect a normal user to run.

It doesn't meaningfully make you "more independent" because all Relays are trivial (they're just dumb re-broadcasters of a stream) and it makes sense to use one run by somebody else — a company or a community that's pooling resources.

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4. miki123211 ◴[31 Aug 25 07:04 UTC] No.45081017[source]▶
There's no real reason to set up a relay for just one person, though.

It's less like a cellular plan and more like building your own private cell tower just because you can.

5. yoshuaw ◴[31 Aug 25 10:59 UTC] No.45082215[source]▶
Aren't the entities who manage relays the ones who broker access to the network? E.g. if you subscribe to a relay, you must also subscribe to their moderation decisions.

Say if Bluesky (the company) bans someone, that person could still have the keys to their data, but their feeds will no longer be "re-broadcast" by that company's servers - right?

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6. neko-moe ◴[31 Aug 25 12:45 UTC] No.45082755{3}[source]▶
Relays aren't really user-facing, so most relay operators would probably only censor a user on the relay if there is some legal or network reason to do so, say content illegal in their jurisdiction or excessive spam.

If an app is concerned that a relay is censoring some user that they care about, the easiest solution is just to host their own relay. It's probably cheaper to operate than their app is. But if they really wanted to, they could listen to multiple relays to "cover the gap" or just manually listen to the event stream from specific users' PDSs directly whenever they notice censorship (effectively operating a partial relay in addition to listening to a full but censored one). But, again, in reality they'd just host their own relay and not bother complicating things.

The hardest problem of relays censoring content is to notice it happening, but once you notice you can easily verify it and switch to a different relay.