Bluesky should make these easier so your average Linux admin can attempt to host the full stack, as opposed to only being able to host a PDS. This would eliminate the criticism about Bluesky's design.
If you want a small scaled down setup for just a small community, which still interoperates with the full network but doesn't have a complete network, there are setups like AppViewLite, which can run on, eg, an old laptop at home: https://github.com/alnkesq/AppViewLite
Personally, I don't think individualist self-hosting is a necessary or helpful goal for indexing the network. Most humans are not interested in spending the time or learning the skills to do this, even if it was as easy as setting up a self-hosted blog with RSS. I think small collectives (orgs, coops, communities, neighborhoods, companies, etc) exist and can fill this role.
Regardless, this is moving the discussion, which was about whether it was possible to decentralize each component the network, not whether it was pragmatic for individuals to self-host the whole thing.
That's crazy cheap! Everybody on HN should be able to run one of these, just cancel your Claude Code Max subscription
All kidding aside, that's incredibly cost effective and heartening to read. I expected the cost of running a relay to be much higher.
Well, this is exactly my point. ATProto's infrastructure is too hard for most humans, and that is the reason for the centralization complaint.
The team's goal should be to make it easier, so the complaint goes away.
I didn't know about these recent attempts, they're impressive for sure. However they write[1] about zeppelin:
"The cost to run this is about US $200/mo, primarily due to the 16 terabytes of storage it currrently uses"
So when you here give that $200/mo cost as a price point for "organized groups", you are forecasting that the cost of storage will go down as fast as the BlueSky data size grows? At what rate right now is the data size growing? Because the last numbers I saw were something like 2TB, so it being already 16TB sounds like $200/mo is not going to be enough very soon.
But certain things like full-network relays/app views just have inherent bandwidth/storage/compute costs associated with them but it's definitely something a non-profit (like Internet Archive) could easily afford to do.
The PLC service could likely be hosted for ~$40/mo.