rudyfraser

Chiming in to say as the CEO of Blacksky that not only do we have an independent AT Protocol implementation in Rust (https://github.com/blacksky-algorithms/rsky)

Not only do we run a fully independent stack (https://docs.blacksky.community/readme/list-of-our-services)

Not only are we getting paid by other orgs to stand up independent app view servers.

We also received a license from Bluesky for the atproto trademark.

There are no qualms in the ecosystem from people making money, getting users, and providing new experiences about this.

It’s not “AT Protocol fans” who aren’t taking issue with this. It’s business with employees and organizations making a positive impact.

It’s easy to criticize if you’re not actively shipping things.

AP also has relays as a part of the architecture, just less well documented https://joinfediverse.wiki/index.php?mobileaction=toggle_vie...

> It really doesn't seem realistic for anyone to run any of the infrastructure themselves. You're always going to be reliant on a big player that has the capital to keep everything running smoothly

I run a custom rust-based firehose consumer on the main firehose using a cheap digitalocean droplet and don't cross 15% CPU usage even during the peak 33 Mb/s bandwidth described in this article.

The core team seem to put a lot of intention into being able to host different parts of the network. The most resource intensive of which is the relay which produces the event stream that Jetstream and others consume from. One of their devs did a breakdown of that and showed you could run it at $150 per month which is pricey but not unattainable with grants or crowdfunding https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/entries/Notes%20on%20Running...

Have you considered making a custom feed for the HN crowd? I think there'd be a lot of interest in that. Could work similar to the What's Science feed.

That's on the client, not the protocol. A few folks have built clients but for some reason hasn't made this a feature.

All posts are publicly accessible though -- here's Jake Tapper's posts for example

https://bsky.social/xrpc/com.atproto.repo.listRecords?repo=d...

EDIT: This client lets you look up any post/profile without logging in https://blue.amazingca.dev/?username=did%3Aplc%3Aupkgvxvhn4e...

I signed up for the beta on February 21st and got my invite last week at the top of May as they started letting folks in. From a graph I saw, they only had a couple hundred users til about April, then the May batch brought in another 50K (of which I was one). It's at 65K total now I think.

I have a negligible following on social media and don't know anyone over there so I don't think they're being cliquey with the invites.

To someone else's point, they're doing a lot of firefighting. When I got in, your followers list did an infinite loop, "hellthreads" were causing errors every time you viewed a reply, and content moderation was (and still is) constantly breaking (NSFW stuff keeps breaking through on their placeholder "what's hot" algorithm). I was able to register @salesforce.herokuapp.com as my handle, etc.

I think it's a beta in the truest sense of the word and you'll probably get an invite soon.

> "hey, smart people do smart things so mutual aid is a smart thing."

Very happy to have searched "mutual aid" on hacker news today and come across this comment.