> A raspberry pi with a nvme drive costs 200 dollars one time. Are you seriously going to assert that is expensive?
Compared to the hardware required to run a PDS, yes, absolutely. "Expensive" is relative.
And like I've said above, a Raspberry Pi with an NVMe drive is surely a long ways off from Bluesky's own relay. It's good enough for personal needs, not for any sort of production use.
> You don’t understand what a relay does in atproto given the rest of your reply and should look.
I'd appreciate specific corrections, so that I (and anyone else reading these comments) can be better-informed.
(EDIT: my apologies for the previous version of this comment, which might've come across a bit hostile. That ain't my intention.)
The statement "any federated servers interacting with Bluesky" is ambiguous, because Bluesky's federated model means there's many different types of servers, and one user's view of what a "federated server" could be vastly different from another.
Federated PDS-s (which is probably the closest to what people mean when they say they want to federate on bluesky) would not need to reconstruct timelines if their users use the bsky.app appview.
Thanks, that's a fair point that I was overlooking. When I say a "federated server", I don't just mean a self-hosted PDS, I mean a third party app that potentially has its own lexicon and design decisions. Creating a robust third-party app that can meaningfully interact with the Bluesky network is still a very difficult engineering challenge, which I think this article does a good job demonstrating—that was the tension I was trying to underscore in my comment. Bluesky may be solving those engineering challenges for those clients who are satisfied with Bluesky's frontend and AppView, but every single other app built on top of ATProto will have to resolve those same challenges. This is directly downstream from Bluesky's "global firehose" topology and various design decisions that stem from that.
There is not a bespoke setup that you need to implement atproto. In fact, there are already a variety of applications making use of it (some to a higher degree than others). There are community implementations of app views, relays, PLC directories, and PDSes already in the wild, and - although I admittedly have a biased ear on the conversation - developers tend to appreciate the _lack_ of complication when implementing things.
The Bluesky app and the protocol it is built on are open source, MIT licensed.
The app is built using React/React Native as well as a variety of other open source tools. We maintain multiple React Native libraries as well that are open source.
The network is open, and anyone has access to the firehose. Third parties are free to run labelers that integrate with the application as well as build feeds which can be used by yourself or others inside the app. Anyone is free to use the open source SDKs to build their own third-party Bluesky apps or entirely unique applications using atprotocol.
To be frank, "it's just an app that happens to be open source" seems to be a pretty bad faith take on what Bluesky is.
So ... can I run my own infrastructure that’s part of the Bluesky network? What rules does it have to play by? That’s what really matters.
The apps being open source is great of course, but the standards for openness are very high for (something aiming to be) internet-level infrastructure.
A single company having a lot of control would be a bit of a red flag in this context. The rug pull incentives are huge (that said I am a proponent of commercial interests in open ecosystems, provided they don’t get too much control).
Yes, it is absolutely possible to build on atprotocol and be a part of the network. We have written a good bit about this already here: https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers (in addition to the recently updated documentation in general)
