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What's to stop someone running their own relay and appview, but "locked down", so that instead of trying to scrape every account from every PDS in the world, they only look at a limited subset? This doesn't sound too difficult. (He says, not having tried to do it...)

Absolutely doable, if you're willing to deal with broken threads everywhere or alternatively backfill from other servers (slower) every time you see a reference not in your index

the issue i face with this is: how do i host something for a community that can see everything on the protocol but does not rely on/trust bluesky pbllc infrastructure without making it a major effort? microcosm projects exist but the ux isn’t there, generally (no feeds, labelers, etc)

is it actually an open protocol if it takes $50k/yr to not rely on the company that invented it?

This is exactly the point of the article. You don’t need an infinite archive of 40M accounts if your goal is independence. You can run a Red Dwarf instance. You can run a PDS. etc etc Just like no one runs a copy of all Mastodon servers in the world.

Roundabout runs a full, independent atproto stack for each community in the $10s of dollars per community per month. Getting below that is easily possible, either by combining the community infrastructure and/or by making latency tradeoffs.

Are those communities with the full atproto stack connected to the "Atmosphere", e.g. do they get the full atproto firehose? Or are they separate "islands"? Basically a cluster of (or even just one) PDS with a combined AppView+relay, only serving and seeing community accounts/participants?

Right now they're islands, with fully independent PLC, PDS, etc. We could turn on the firehose, but we need to figure out what that means from a UX perspective, first. Taking things step by step. 😊

Would be fun to do that small instance implementation but also make it (optionally, and obviously with non trivial cost) implement AP for local users. Then people wouldn't have to choose which protocol. Although that starts to sound like embrace extend extinguish.

That's essentially a server with a native bridgy plugin

The Bridgy codebase is a full PDS implementation 😛