I appreciate this effort. I've definitely been interested in how plausible it would be to, today, run another instance of the Bluesky AppView, mainly because AT proto seems promising, but to really meet it's full potential it needs independent operators with different sensibilities.
I've been thinking a lot about the relay, though. 4.5 terabytes is, well... A lot, to say the least. If Bluesky grows 100x larger, running a relay will become pretty insanely expensive. I guess if the Bluesky organization remains fairly neutral about the relay part, it's not a huge deal, but:
- It always eventually becomes hard to stay neutral. Eventually someone will get mad at something going through your network that isn't just obvious network abuse like SPAM.
- It seems like drinking from the firehouse itself will eventually become expensive. Will it be possible for something this high bandwidth to remain freely-accessible?