@laurenshof @skarnio @thenexusofprivacy no, a self-hosted PDS is not the closest comparison to a self-hosted instance, because a self-hosted ActivityPub server is sufficient to fully join the network, a self-hosted PDS in atproto is *not*, which is exactly the point me and @FediTips have been making. atproto is designed to depend on corporate (= expensive) relays to work. A PDS alone is useless.
@oblomov @skarnio @thenexusofprivacy @FediTips
other products build on atproto, such as event planner smokesignal.events, skip the relay altogether and do not use the relay at all. I am not 100% sure but I think linkaggregator Frontpage.fyi skips the relay as well. So not, it is not designed to be dependent on that, it is an optimalisation part for Bluesky.
@laurenshof @oblomov @skarnio @thenexusofprivacy @FediTips
Both of those are still AppViews, which are more expensive to run than Relays.
While PDSs (write access to the network) are indeed cheap, read access definitely is not, especially since the cost scales with total network activity for each reader with the current PDS and Relay features.
Not saying that it's a bad protocol per se, because there is clear demand for global indexing and singleton frontends and ActivityPub is bad at those aspects, but the protocol economics are completely prohibitive for most indie participants in terms of providing unenshittified end user access.
@Qazm @oblomov @skarnio @thenexusofprivacy @FediTips
smokesignal runs on a 10 dollar/month VPS right now, from my understanding frontpage to be very similar. like i said, appview costs scale fairly linearly with the amount of users they have to serve. just like you can build a small server for a few people on fedi for cheap, if you want you can build a small appview on atproto for a few people for cheap. obviously expensive if you want to serve millions of ppl tho
