silverpill
I saw the news that ATProto relay is now very cheap to run, and went to check it. Turns out "cheap" means 10 GB RAM, 500 GB SSD, 50mbps bandwidth. This is more than minimum Ethereum node requirements, and I am not sure how it could possibly be worse than that.
Needless to say, relay is only one component in their laughably inefficient system, which is still not decentralized in any meaningful way.
silverpill
@lutindiscret Why would anyone cram so much people into a single Mastodon instance? This is inhuman
Lutin Discret
@silverpill i’m really not sure that a x000 users mastodon instance would require less actually. It’s big number but still not reserved to bigtech number
silverpill
@raphael Ethereum node needs to know about every single message to prevent double spending. Social networks don't need that
Raphael Lullis
> This is more than minimum Ethereum node requirements
Oh, come on. Ethereum's base layer handles less than 30 transactions per second. If this was unbounded of course it would require more hardware as well...
tesaguri 🦀🦝
@silverpill My understanding is that their definition of "cheap" is intended for organizations as the entry cost of the "market" of ATProto services, which I think is consistent with their stated goal of "credible exit", that is, giving users multiple choices of whole platforms (as opposed to empowering every user to affordably self-host a whole set of social networking functionalities, oh no).
Yes, that's a very different view of the world from ours, but it's at least self-consistent, maybe. Still not to my taste though
silverpill
@tesaguri As long as they position themselves as decentralized social, we should compare ATP and AP apples-to-apples, and that means counting the entire stack.
silverpill
@oldmanspidey It is capable of being a bottleneck and a single point of failure for the Bluesky network. I am not sure if there are other benefits.
spidey :Clairen_0: :Hodan_0:
@silverpill
So what does this mean exactly? What is a relay running on these specs capable of? /gen
silverpill
@reiver Yes, it can be fixed by changing a protocol so it works like ActivityPub, but that simply means they were lying all along about advantages of ATProto over it.
@reiver ⊼ (Charles) :batman:
The CTO of Bluesky (Paul Frazee) seemed to be encouraging people to access the PDSes (personal data servers) directly, rather than getting everything through Bluesky's Firehose Relay.
I did see one app that was doing that now.
...
That makes Bluesky feel a bit more like a Fediverse architecture.
@reiver ⊼ (Charles) :batman:
Maybe a polite way of expressing their "social reason" is —
They felt very, very unwelcomed.
Although, perhaps a bit more of a direct description is captured by what I paraphrased, from someone at a recent Bluesky conference, here (at this URL):
https://mastodon.social/@reiver/114208310829137604
That paraphrasing is about developers (rather than the Bluesky team), but — my understanding is, I think the Bluesky team also had the same feeling.
silverpill
@reiver @nextgraph That sounds like a post-factum rationalization, not a real reason. Those who are invested in other protocols always say Mastodon this, Mastodon that, but in reality builders are not leaving Fediverse and development today is more active than ever. A couple of angry comments might stop a single developer, but I don't believe that was the reason for Bluesky team to create a different protocol. Besides, I didn't see any negative reaction in the beginning, quite the opposite. They alienated a huge part of open source community by moving discussions in Discord, but that had nothing to do with Fediverse.
I think the real reason is that money for Bluesky came with strings attached, and they had to design a system from which value can be extracted, and the most obvious way to do this at the time was to create bottlenecks where ads can be inserted into peoples timelines.
@reiver ⊼ (Charles) :batman:
I suspect they are trying to be polite.
I have now heard the Bluesky CTO state why they didn't go with ActivityPub (at least) 3 times.
Each time, the wording was a bit different, but the message seemed to be the same.
He gave one technical reason, and one social reason.
Given how much time they spent developing their protocol, I suspect they could have solved the technical problem (in much less time).
Which just leaves the social reason.
Which I suspect is the actual reason.
NextGraph
@reiver @silverpill What is the social reason then? (I didn't follow the public announcements coming from BSKY) So just asking if you can share this info.
silverpill
@oldmanspidey All things considered, the specs are pretty good. Relay was way hungrier before
spidey :Clairen_0: :Hodan_0:
@silverpill well I know what a relay does, generally speaking. I more so meant are these specs good or bad, and why? I am not that knowledgeable.
NextGraph
@reiver @silverpill Thanks!
Also, nice to read that Lexicon is almost RDF.
nextgraph did it better: it is RDF.
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