Crucially, the purpose of Blacksky is to provide a service for the (US) black community which has its own moderation decisions while being substantially interoperable.
(Remember, the reasons people use one social network rather than another are almost always social first and technical second, where the social functions are enabled or hindered by the technology)
I'll post this as a top level comment, because I think it is crucial: A few people are saying that it is expensive to run a relay but others have done it for as low as $34/month [1]. So unless somebody presents other proof that it is expensive I would say that those posters are either wrong and trying to mislead us on purpose.
Edit: actually the article links to somebody doing it for $18/month.
> We run a full AppView + PDS + Relay for ~$1,772/mo. PDS is cheap (~$0.03/user/mo, 4 vCPUs, 32GB RAM). AppView is the expensive part; indexes the entire network (16TB DB), not just your users. Storage scales linearly with network activity. PDS scales linearly with your account count.
The thing that makes ATproto nice and decentralized is that PDSs are decoupled from the application itself. Anyone can run a separate AppView, and just a handful of AppViews is enough to give people meaningful choice on ATproto, with the benefit of being much more approachable than ActivityPub for people who are not technically inclined.
Censorship here is specifically moderation of discussion of political assassinations, and NSFW fetish art work? I think its good to have a space for people to do "shadow work", but also I'm terrified by the path that neo-facist idiology took from 4chan /pol -> gaming culture -> the white house.
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 25.1 ms ] threadDespite its faults ActivityPub is superior.
Crucially, the purpose of Blacksky is to provide a service for the (US) black community which has its own moderation decisions while being substantially interoperable.
(Remember, the reasons people use one social network rather than another are almost always social first and technical second, where the social functions are enabled or hindered by the technology)
Blacksky grew to millions of users without spending a dollar
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45018773
Edit: actually the article links to somebody doing it for $18/month.
[1] https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lo7a2a4qxg2l
Source, Rudy, the creator of Blacksky: https://bsky.app/profile/rude1.blacksky.team/post/3mgpvknv4i...
The thing that makes ATproto nice and decentralized is that PDSs are decoupled from the application itself. Anyone can run a separate AppView, and just a handful of AppViews is enough to give people meaningful choice on ATproto, with the benefit of being much more approachable than ActivityPub for people who are not technically inclined.