this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2025
797 points (98.7% liked)

Fediverse memes

609 readers
1165 users here now

Memes about the Fediverse

Other relevant communities:

founded 4 months ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 3 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

ATProto Relays, which consolidate all the data across the network into a single location. They are necessary for efficiency

How? And the fediverse works the other way around.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (2 children)

Basically, on ATProto, everyone stores their own data on a PDS (Personal Data Server). This includes every post, image, video, follow, like, block, etc. The relay crawls the open web for PDSs to consolidate into a single stream of data.

From here, services can build off of that single data stream without needing to do any crawling of their own.

Of course, this does give the operator of the relay a lot of power. If they were to block your PDS, then only services relying on a different relay can access your data. This is especially why it is important that there exist independent third-party relays, but no one has taken up the mantle yet.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 hours ago

The PDS design is a nice approach to making AT Proto distributed. But, the way they chose to operate relays means that the protocol requires massive investment to run.

The absolute minimum spend for a node right now, even with Bluesky still growing, is something like tens of thousands of dollars per year. If Bluesky does become the next Twitter, it will probably be $100k+ per year to run a relay. That means a company could run a relay, maybe a university could run one, but it's way out of the reach of anyone but the richest of individual users.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Can't someone theoretically make an Activitypub relay which hosts information from all private instances that federate with it? Like, how is this (AT Protocol) better

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago

They already exist, they range from smaller webring like relays to ones that tie the major nodes together.