@oblomov @FediTips @skarnio @thenexusofprivacy

those are completely different things.

the closest comparison is hosting your own PDS on atproto, which is even cheaper than that.

But fundamentally, atproto has a different network architecture, where it splits network storage/identity away from the frontend software.

ATproto is: data storage (PDS, anyone can run one, decentralised), aggregated into full network relay, processed by appview into microblogging app

@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.

@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