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It doesn't solve those problems, except in an alternative universe where there are a very large number of appviews capable of consuming the entire firehose and

It doesn't solve those problems, except in an alternative universe where there are a very large number of appviews capable of consuming the entire firehose and you can freely choose between them and cheaply run your own. ATProto is like RSS in a universe where you can only read RSS through Google Reader (or a clone of Google Reader running on the same scale).

danabramov 4mo ago
I don’t know what you’re saying. I’m running an atproto app and it’s perfectly capable of ingesting the entire firehouse as it comes in. It costs me maybe $10/mo and mostly because I haven’t fixed some memory leaks. Of course, few of records that come through are relevant to my app so I don’t store them. If I wanted to store gigabytes of records (like Bluesky) for millions of users forever then yes it would be more expensive. Which would be the case with any tech! What are you comparing it to? How is this a downside of atproto? Mastodon instances aren’t a valid comparison point because by definition they’re small-world. They don’t serve millions of users. If your point is that you want small-world atproto, that’s absolutely possible. Take the Bluesky server codebase and make it so that it ignores incoming content beyond some criteria (like “follows of server member list”). You can recreate Mastodon experience on atproto, it just hasn’t been very interesting to anyone so far AFAIK.
- zoul 4mo ago
  I think we are all saying that Mastodon is meaningfully decentralized and there is no single party that could pull the rug from beneath the whole network. This is what instances bring to the table. Bluesky may be architecturally beautiful, but it’s not decentralized in practice. (See https://arewedecentralizedyet.online https://arewedecentralizedyet.online for example.) And we know what tends to happen to important centralized services.

danabramov 4mo ago

I don’t know what you’re saying. I’m running an atproto app and it’s perfectly capable of ingesting the entire firehouse as it comes in. It costs me maybe $10/mo and mostly because I haven’t fixed some memory leaks. Of course, few of records that come through are relevant to my app so I don’t store them. If I wanted to store gigabytes of records (like Bluesky) for millions of users forever then yes it would be more expensive. Which would be the case with any tech! What are you comparing it to? How is this a downside of atproto? Mastodon instances aren’t a valid comparison point because by definition they’re small-world. They don’t serve millions of users. If your point is that you want small-world atproto, that’s absolutely possible. Take the Bluesky server codebase and make it so that it ignores incoming content beyond some criteria (like “follows of server member list”). You can recreate Mastodon experience on atproto, it just hasn’t been very interesting to anyone so far AFAIK.

zoul 4mo ago
I think we are all saying that Mastodon is meaningfully decentralized and there is no single party that could pull the rug from beneath the whole network. This is what instances bring to the table. Bluesky may be architecturally beautiful, but it’s not decentralized in practice. (See https://arewedecentralizedyet.online https://arewedecentralizedyet.online for example.) And we know what tends to happen to important centralized services.