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Comment by 1dom | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for the fair response, I agree you're being cheeky. Sorry, I'm being lazy not searching here, but have you written anything on if instances of something is a good measure of decentralisation? (FWIW, I feel independently owned/managed instances in the traditional non-mastodon-definition seems like an okay measure of decentralisation.)

I completely agree with the point in your link that relays are different to instances - I love architectures involving dumb-relay or zero-trust type nodes. But I think Relays should still be mentioned in your post, since they're probably the main architectural element which protect PDS instances from the scale issues heavily federated AP instances might face, right? (I only have a high level understanding of ATProto and very little experience with AP, happy to be told I just need to learn more for this to make sense.)

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In Mastodon/AP, different instances talk to each other which creates the scale problem you’re mentioning.

AT doesn’t have this kind of issue even without Relays. This is because PDS never talks to another PDS so there’s no quadratic growth of edges. PDS only talks to apps, and there’s limited amount of apps on the network. And end users hit apps which cache stuff, so apps tend to take the user traffic hit.

Relays are helpful more on the app side because you don’t want to teach each app to crawl PDS’s and subscribe to them.

I didn’t dive into Relays in the article because they’re kind of a “next obvious optimization” but not really inherent to the model. There are other models like apps hitting shared backlink caches (like Constellation). Relay isn’t fundamental in the way hosting and apps are.

Wouldn't I have the same quadratic growth (if not worse) if each community were to self-host their app view and relay?

> because you don’t want to teach each app to crawl PDS’s and subscribe to them

Why not?

If I want true decentralization, that means no central component. For the same reason that communities and individuals host their own RSS readers, each community will in the end also have to host their own relay and app view.

The benefits of decentralisation, including fault-resistance and censorship-resistance, can only manifest once every community is self-hosting their own relay and app view.

Maybe we’re just ideologically misaligned here. I think every single little community hosting a copy of every single app is insane, and not where I’d like to end up. It’s like the extreme end of the spectrum compared to centralized Web 2.0. I think atproto’s ethos falls somewhere in the middle — community is mostly a “soft” primitive, and there’s only so many full-scale “copies” of some app as there are strong opinions+funding bundles that motivate their existence. So maybe not too many for large scale ones.

> Maybe we’re just ideologically misaligned here. I think every single little community hosting a copy of every single app is insane, and not where I’d like to end up

Well, it's where we used to be — and it solves most of the issues of the modern web. Forums, blogs, IRC, teamspeak, gaming servers, etc, it all used to work relatively well with that approach.

I don’t think the problem I want solved here is replicating forums, blogs, IRC, Teamspeak, or gaming servers. I want something a lot like Twitter but with some way to take my stuff and leave if an asshole takes control. I don’t want Mastodon, because from what I’ve seen of it when friends link me stuff from it it’s extremely clunky and slow. Plus, whenever I’ve gone to create an account I’ve been presented with a huge list of servers to chose from, many of which seem to be focused on a specific topic, which makes me think I need to pick which community I want to be tied to with minimal knowledge.

Twitter became a global phenomenon with the same UI and an even slower ruby on rails implementation behind it, despite the constant fail whale.

> Plus, whenever I’ve gone to create an account I’ve been presented with a huge list of servers to chose from, many of which seem to be focused on a specific topic, which makes me think I need to pick which community I want to be tied to with minimal knowledge.

As you're already self-hosting ATproto anyway, why not self-host a mastodon instance as well?

> Twitter became a global phenomenon with the same UI and an even slower ruby on rails implementation behind it, despite the constant fail whale.

I’m not sure what this comment is responding to. I don’t want a constant fail whale or a slow experience, and I don’t think a lot of other people would want that either.

> As you're already self-hosting ATproto anyway, why not self-host a mastodon instance as well?

Hosting a PDS is free, plus it’s considerably lighter weight conceptually than a whole Mastodon instance!

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