this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2024
586 points (94.3% liked)
Technology
59533 readers
3420 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I won't be joining in until I can actually run a real instance on my own.
I don't plan on doing that, but the important part is knowing that I could.
Instances are run through a central "relay" which is controlled by Bluesky HQ, so it isn't decentralized like, say, Mastodon is.
I know.
ATproto has some interesting advantages, and eventually the idea is for anyone to be able to host any microservice component of the network, including relays other than the one run by Bluesky.
The relays don't need to be centralized. They are indexers that provide functionality to others parts of the ATproto network.
The problem is that there isn't really any incentive to do so... Any additional instances or new apps running ATproto can just rely on the one big indexer provided by Bluesky, instead of running each microservice component themselves.
Would the relays be connected, though? Or would each one be an entirely different ecosystem?
No.
But they don't need to be. They're essentially just indexers.
If two relays index all the same content, then any services using either will be "interconnected" in the sense that any users can see each other and interact with each other.
Each relay host can choose what parts of the network they want to index, and as far as I can tell, any services could use multiple relays if they like.