this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2024
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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.
Facebook creating a bluesky instance in 3... 2... 1...
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:
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.
Damn those are some terrible distributed scaling mechanisms.