From the stats of people who ran their own PDS for their own accounts, it used an less than 1mb of data transfer a day and insignificant amounts of CPU/RAM (less than a 20% spike). But, it will depend on how big your account is, how many followers you have, number of posts you make, etc etc.
In native Bluesky with a default account, they have decentralized the servers so there are maybe around 20-30 servers all on the East Coast of the US. There's currently not much incentive to run your own. The PDS software is fairly new and unless you just wanted to have a non-US host for privacy reasons, you could do so and get away with running it on a RPi or standard VPS no problem. No one has yet started any major instances to rival the primary ones yet, however.
First I’m hearing of it!
That's not right. Most AP servers operate a shared inbox. So you only need to send one message - no matter how many followers you have on that server.
One of the nicer centrist instances is Beehaw and they defederated a lot of stuff just to keep the atmosphere alright.
I used to think it was a bad thing when instances defederated each other but since I saw the above happening I agree with it.
"This is just for a brief period during polishing/debugging since this is the first time third-party PDS hosts have been added to the network. The goal is just to help PDS operators join the network and make sure that if there's a problem we have a channel of communication open."
Nostr and Bluesky's AT protocol are the most promising. I love the truly distributed nature of Nostr, but the ecosystem is hard to get into. Bluesky has strong technical underpinnings and accessibility, but they're the only ones developing and implementing AT protocol.
Social media should be more P2P and learn from the 2000's era before the platform giants stole away the dream. Bittorrent, RSS, Atom, semantic web (FOAF, microformats) were the way to complete digital freedom.
I can't understand the toxicity of mind that makes people think it's OK to impose others view their own, unwanted points of view.
If you're not welcome in a community, join one that would hear you. Why would that be against your "freedom"?
Then some instances defederate otherwise innocent instances that don’t have sufficient agreement on all those points, regardless of actual content.
It is kind of tiring and honestly hard to recommend.
With something like nostr, you are free as a relay operator to block whatever makes you feel uncomfortable, while users can just get that content from some other relay without having to create a new account and move their entire social graph over.
You're using words like toxic to describe me and you don't even know me. This goes to show the incredibly rotten and highly polarized the status quo has become. Systems that behave the way you're describing are the current norm, and they're broken.
You can choose for yourself to ignore me. You can advertise to the world that you ignore me and people can opt into that if they choose. But you shouldn't ever have the right to unilaterally make that call for everyone. Nobody should have that power.
Imagine if [opposite viewpoint] could technologically shut you down for everyone else? The systems we design today could enable that tomorrow. Just because you're in a comfortable spot today doesn't mean that eroding rights and freedoms won't ensnare you tomorrow or that the zeitgeist won't change.
> If you're not welcome in a community
This is also frankly a disturbing trend. Creating little fiefdoms of unacceptance. Who makes you the judge of that? You don't even know what my views and values are, and you're seeking to shun me already.
We're all the same. We just sample the world differently. We all need to be more accepting and loving and stop playing petty team sports.
In the meantime, you're free to keep on tooting. Nobody is taking Mastodon away from you. It's just not a system I want to spend time or energy advocating for.
People are only people so fierce moderation will happen. With smaller instances "blast radius" is smaller and it shouldn't be problematic like in centralized social media.
That's a feature, not a bug. Whatever your preferences, there's an ActivityPub instance with moderation you'll like. Want to be in a liberal thought bubble? It's there. Want nothing but all Trump, all the time? They have that. Only the good things about astrology? Yep. Aggressive blocking of anti-science woo? Sure.
Moderation decisions are made at the instance level, not the network level. There are instances that take a laissez-faire approach. Others are quite heavy handed. Most are somewhere in the middle. Users can pick which sounds best to them and find servers that align with their wishes.
What if I want to be on both? Well you need two accounts.
I highly recommend reading the actual protocol docs if you’re interested in learning about it and it’s scalability.
In a centralized system, you trust the central authority to show the correct number of likes a post got and the correct info who liked a post. Same for number of followers and who follows whom.
Do any of these 3 protocols have an approach to do the same in a decentralized world?
It's a central part of social media, even here on HN.
Look at the front page. Each post shows 6 pieces of information:
Title, Domain, Points, Author, Time, Comments
2 of them = 33% are numeric indicators we trust because we trust HN.Likes and follows are probably two of the main reasons that centralized social media sites have displaced websites, rss, forums, mailing lists, newsgroups etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web
Also, a common requirement is authenticated reads and fine-grained access control of pull-based content. E.g. I want to share my vacation photos with a different subset of friends/followers vs my tech blogging, only some of which should be public.
## manyverse/sbb https://www.manyver.se/ (SBB)
## farcaster https://www.farcaster.xyz/ (Ethereum)
## a social app based on peers (formerly known as hypercore) https://twitter.com/Pears_p2p https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39373960
Nope. This is most likely a bad idea. And we've already essentially proven this because the overwhelmingly most important method of internet communication DOESN'T centralize like this and has no need to. Email works fine, probably better, WITHOUT this strong centralization.
So while I agree with all the current short term clique-related critcisms of ActivityPub/Mastodon, it's still the smartest model.