this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2025
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Ok, noted, you are a fanatic who does not understand that the statement of yours I replied to literally is a logically impossible paradox.
Take a few deep breaths and ... maybe try to reformulate your words.
Not knowing what a relay does and going on the attack over it makes you the fanatic.
It's an archive node, which can (but doesn't have to) forward ingested data
It is very, very clear, reading your other comments that you are incapable of grasping the concept of a decentralized or distributed network paradigm.
Maybe go look at how torrents work, how I2P works, how a MeshNet works.
Other metaphors would be a guerilla warfare network of cells vs a top down conventional hierarchy where individual units are allowed a degree of autonomy within certain bounds.
The AT Protocol system is not capable of operating in a non centralized manner.
Your only option is to point your PDS at either the official network of Relays... or set up your own system of Relays, and point your PDS at that.
Likewise for an AppView, you can either point yours to sync with the official network of Relays... or another network of Relays.
There is no meshing, where nodes on the mesh control what other nodes they interface with.... there is only branching or forking, setting up an entirely parellel structure, that is not capable of synchronizing with the original.
Beyond that, you still have not addressed that you said a blatantly self contradicting statement; that people self host relays, but also they don't self host relays because that is costly and the self hosted relay code available to the public is experimental and mainly used for reasons tangential to the core function of a production ready relay.
And for the I think third time I have asked this, not of you personally, but in this thread:
Who is hosting a Relay other than BlueSky?
Can you provide evidence any independent person has figured out how to do this and is actually doing it?
I would gladly accept new information and adjust my own understanding accordingly, but all I have seen in this thread so far is multiple people claiming that there are self hosted Relays, and then either providing no evidencd, or showing that they don't understand the subject and post a link to a guide to, or example of, somehow setting up an AppView or PDS.
Go away.
Even I2P uses supernodes, that doesn't make it centralized because you don't depend on them.
You don't need ultra purist single-type-node mesh like scuttlebutt to be decentralized.
Bluesky is federated, where the federation has multiple layers and EVERY layer can be run independently and interconnected to other nodes.
You can even connect to MULTIPLE! An appview can talk to many relays, a PDS account host can talk to many relays, anybody can subscribe to multiple separate feeds generators and moderation labelers hosted wherever, using any app, etc.
Your inability to read remains YOUR problem, not mine.
My point is exactly this - it's feasible to maintain your own private relay by mirroring the content you want, imitating both Mastodon and scuttlebutt.
You can choose to share a community relay - or not.
Running it for an audience of yourself is reasonably cheap. Running it for a worldwide audience is where bandwidth gets expensive. That's why people run private ones.
Not capable of synchronizing with the original? Lmao. It's literally content addressed, you can synchronize with every relay separately, swap arbitrarily between public appviews, regardless of who runs what and where it gets data from. It's maximally capable of synchronization. It even beats nostr and scuttlebutt because you can VERIFY you have fresh and complete data (Merkle trees yay).
Pretty sure Whitewind pulls in data themselves directly when users use self hosted atproto accounts, maintaining its own relay index. Don't think they make it publicly accessible though
Not having gatekeepers is what matters the most. You can run all infrastructure yourself and still interact with bluesky users (need to use DID:Web, but that's a minor point)