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Its simply too expensive to setup alternatives to the bluesky relay and appview. If there's only a handful of them then it's nearly as easy for a government to block all access, or for a ddos to take out a large portion of the network, etc. then if there was just a single provider.

It costs as low as $5 to run the atproto (not Bluesky) relay. Yes, an AppView that has a full text index of microblog posts optimized for search for 43M accounts is going to cost some money. It still costs less than Hachyderm costs. The network works without those features. Use @reddwarf.app

I'm not gonna say it resolves things one way or another but the particular example you linked to says "let's see how long it stays up" and seems to, currently, not be up

There's a lot of great work happening in bringing ATproto to a greater degree of decentralization than it was before! I'm not saying otherwise. I'm just saying this particular example doesn't convince me yet "it only costs $5"

“demo”, in the name, two months ago, is the reason it’s not up now

Fair!

This is an improvement over the $20/month relays, which have been viable for 6-9 months. Which you’ve been informed of before. So top of this thread calling them Bluesky relays and too expensive is 1) unkind and 2) incorrect Yell at Bluesky or yell at the community. Be correct, please.

I didn't make that claim at the top of this thread, I didn't author it. My own claims were framed differently. My framing is that right now there is a star topology and there may be a handful of full load-bearing star-roots; most of what we will see will be downstream from there