There are no instances in ATProto • Hacker News Board

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#281

Post by h14h » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 4:28 PM UTC

kuschku wrote: post #276

h14h wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an interesting take because AtProto feels both more accessible AND more decentralized to me (at least with my current mental model). With ActivityPub, because running an instance requires hosting the data, the application, and dealing with all the subsequent scaling challenges, you kinda have to choose between being taking on active ops responsibilities or tying yourself to someone else's instance (which will…

> This is an interesting take because AtProto feels both more accessible AND more decentralized to me (at least with my current mental model). A good measure for decentralisation is: Can your community continue using the service if the rest of the world disappeared? Can you still federate with other communities that might still exist? What else needs to remain for the service to remain useful? With mastodon, all of t…

How is that trivially answered with Mastodon? And what does "the rest of the world disappearing" actually mean in your example?

Everything I'm seeing about hosting costs in the current day and age is that the full AtProto stack (PDS, Relay, AppView) is roughly in par with hosting an ActivityPub instance of equivalent size (if not a little cheaper).

And with AtProto, folks get to pick and choose what slice of the stack they wanna host, and opt-in to more of it gradually as they see fit. With ActivityPub, you are either opting in to hosting an entire instance, or fully reliant on someone else.

I'm open to the idea I'm misunderstanding some aspect of ActivityPub, given I've not really explored the hosting side of all that deeply.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#282

Post by kuschku » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 4:31 PM UTC

danabramov wrote: post #278

kuschku wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm already running my own RSS reader, Matrix server, Mastodon instance, etc. How do I run my own appview? They surely have a git repo, docker images and helm chart, right? And if I can't self-host it, surely every local computer club should be able to, as they are with all the other protocols?

You can trivially host an appview for your atproto app on your own. I have a hobby atproto app, and I host an appview for it. I mean — an “appview” literally just means “a server with a database that ingests stuff from the network”. It’s not some mysterious thing or some concrete distribution. It just means you’re aggregating stuff into your database. It’s just as cheap as hosting any webapp. But what you’re asking i…

Say bluesky is applying content moderation techniques I disagree with.

What steps do I have to follow to get the majority of users to see my content?

Another example. Let's define decentralisation in terms of bus factor:

How many companies could go bust today before most users would notice?

> To make the comparison fair

Okay, so let's build that, then we can actually talk about building a decentralized network on atproto.

How do I build a relay that fetched all content from people I follow, plus all replies to those posts (no matter who sent them), plus automated backfilling if I click on the profile of someone who I'm not following yet?

From what I understand, in bluesky the PDS does not know about replies to a post. So I'd need to scrape the entire network anyway, no matter what, even if I only store some of it.

And every blue-stodon instance would have to scrape every single PDS. So it's a much much worse O(n²) issue, isn't it?

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#283

Post by kuschku » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 4:36 PM UTC

danabramov wrote: post #279

kuschku wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 opinio…

> 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.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#284

Post by smazga » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 4:44 PM UTC

doublepg23 wrote: post #141

echelon wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of this goes away if we just do P2P social media. Swarms of content. Cryptographic identities and content signing/attribution. Cryptographic hashes for content uniqueness/immutability. Immutability in general. Ephemerality (content lives as long as some node cares to retain it, otherwise it gets forgotten). Concrete but extensible ontology for core concepts. You don't need login. You don't need to agree on a comm…

Nostr is basically this. It's a cool idea , in practice it kind of sucks as an experience. It's been developed adjacent to the Bitcoin community and I can't say there's much going on besides spam.

Yeah, kind of a bummer. There are some cool ideas that have been implemented in nostr, but everything has that bitcoin/zap hussle.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#285

Post by kuschku » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 4:45 PM UTC

h14h wrote: post #281

kuschku wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is an interesting take because AtProto feels both more accessible AND more decentralized to me (at least with my current mental model). A good measure for decentralisation is: Can your community continue using the service if the rest of the world disappeared? Can you still federate with other communities that might still exist? What else needs to remain for the service to remain useful? With mastodon, all of t…

How is that trivially answered with Mastodon? And what does "the rest of the world disappearing" actually mean in your example? Everything I'm seeing about hosting costs in the current day and age is that the full AtProto stack (PDS, Relay, AppView) is roughly in par with hosting an ActivityPub instance of equivalent size (if not a little cheaper). And with AtProto, folks get to pick and choose what slice of the stac…

Imagine bluesky (the company) and mastodon.social both disappear tomorrow.

My self-hosted mastodon server continues working, and can continue federating with e.g. chaos.social

With bluesky it's different.

If I am fully self-hosting the entire bluesky app, I need to spend ten thousands of dollars a month, but it'll keep working.

If I self-host my own app, it's cheap and keeps working, but I can only see content from my users in the best of times.

If I use bluesky's relays, it's cheap and shows everyone I follow, but it'll stop working if bluesky disappears.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#286

Post by vvpan » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 4:57 PM UTC

p4bl0 wrote: post #82

I think the analogy presented here is broken. RSS doesn't depend on Google Reader at all. Even at its prime, RSS depended less on Google Reader than email depends on Gmail now. In ATProto, AppViews heavily depends on Relays to be useful, and Relays are quite expensive to run. Also, the yellow circles which represent blogs in the RSS illustration are really not of the same nature as the same circles which represent po…

People have set up relays for like $15/month.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#287

Post by vvpan » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 5:01 PM UTC

dbingham wrote: post #153

notthemessiah wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Relays are quite expensive to run While relays are among the more intensive parts of AT Protocol infrastructure, their cost of operation is still something most people can afford: approximately $30/mo now. What is truly expensive and difficult is something that will be immutably so regardless of how centralized or decentralized you are: moderation. The author of this piece wrote about this common misconception abou…

"Most people" cannot afford $30 /month. And of those who can, most of those cannot afford the time and effort required to run a relay. And I honestly think this is one of the fundamental problems with the push back towards protocols and decentralization. We're overestimating the bandwidth and capabilities of the average user and we haven't fixed the problems that pushed everyone towards centralization in the first pl…

An average user does not need to run their own node for decentralization to work. It just needs to be cheap and easy enough for enough of technical users to run

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#288

Post by ncallaway » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 5:12 PM UTC

cavoirom wrote: post #269

palata wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I wanted to say that. From a user's point of view, it sounds like the AppView is the instance. If you disagree with the moderation, you can move to a different AppView (that may use different relays) but keep your PDS. Whereas with Mastodon your PDS is your AppView, so if you leave the AppView you lose your PDS (and have to somehow export it). Is that correct?

Yeah, I have the same understanding. On Mastodon, an instance is an all on one package. On Bluesky, each component can be deployed separately. The nuance is Bluesky PBC own the Bluesky (iOS, Android, Web) apps, the AppView and the default PDS hosting, I could say it's centralized by default and decentralized at will.

> I could say it's centralized by default

I'm not sure that's totally right, though, because I (using the entirely default bsky stack) can and do regularly interact with people who are using different PDS and AppView's (like, I can interact with Eurosky and blacksky accounts).

I think the thing that is centralized by default is the bsky moderation layer.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#289

Post by tptacek » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 5:15 PM UTC

krapp wrote: post #244

tptacek wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally just Mastodon servers, like Hachyderm, except for a single user.

You literally just set up a Mastodon server and only have a single user. That's what I do, and as far as I know it's the only solution. A "lite" version of Mastodon that dispensed with all of the complexity involved with managing multiple accounts and was optimized for a single user might be nice but with a hosted account you're paying for data storage (which Mastodon seems horribly inefficient with) so in practice t…

Right, my point is, someone should stand up a service, like Blogger did for blogs, which were also trivial for people like us to set up and run on our own.

The thing there is it destroys the objection people have about having to find and fit in with a particular Mastodon server community.

It also makes Mastodon look more like the original blogosphere and less like Twitter, which is a good thing.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#290

Post by ncallaway » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 5:18 PM UTC

Groxx wrote: post #110

danabramov wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If atproto app goes down and it’s open source, anyone can put it back up with all public data intact. Even if it’s not open source, anyone who wants to write the code can still get it back up with all public data intact. I think it’s a substantial difference with “takes the whole thing down”. Can we acknowledge that?

if mastodon.social goes down, people would rightfully say that mastodon.social went down even though it's open source and anyone could run their own. > "But where are all the Bluesky instances?" I agree that it doesn't mean "atproto went down", and I don't mean to imply that. but "bluesky went down" is completely accurate, and bluesky is the one claiming to be decentralized due to using atproto . there are no other i…

> blacksky, last I heard they were still working on a major piece?

While that was true, I don't think it's true anymore. I think blacksky is fully independent. Eurosky is currently in the spot you're describing (partially independent, but moving towards also being fully independent).