Succinctly put, though I got some cognitive dissonance when the author wrote about bluesky being their choice of decentralized network to get involved with without even mentioning the hosting costs involved with running a bsky relay (or whichever component of the ATP network actually holds the data āfirehoseā).
According to this article it took a server that costs around $150/month over 4 days to spin up a working relay, most of which was spent ingurgitating half a terabyte of data (thatās what ended up on disk in any case). Far from exorbitant, yet if I want to self host for my own personal needs itās still gobs more data and compute than any activity pub software needs.
Maybe my view of ādecentralization as in democracyā is just fundamentally different from the authorās. I get the feeling that to them, as long as each friend group has 1 self-hoster in it then democracy through decentralization is preserved. This would make sense that they orient themselves towards something like bluesky and the AT protocol. Personally, I donāt think we should be satisfied with that level of decentralization/democracy - itās a nice start, but we should strive for reaching at least 50% of people self-hosting an activity pub instance to truly achieve the type of decentralization that serves democracy. Of course, Iām not aware of any activity pub software that can be selfhosted by even 10% of the population, currently, so thereās definitely a lot of work to do before my vision is feasible.
Succinctly put, though I got some cognitive dissonance when the author wrote about bluesky being their choice of decentralized network to get involved with without even mentioning the hosting costs involved with running a bsky relay (or whichever component of the ATP network actually holds the data āfirehoseā).
According to this article it took a server that costs around $150/month over 4 days to spin up a working relay, most of which was spent ingurgitating half a terabyte of data (thatās what ended up on disk in any case). Far from exorbitant, yet if I want to self host for my own personal needs itās still gobs more data and compute than any activity pub software needs.
Maybe my view of ādecentralization as in democracyā is just fundamentally different from the authorās. I get the feeling that to them, as long as each friend group has 1 self-hoster in it then democracy through decentralization is preserved. This would make sense that they orient themselves towards something like bluesky and the AT protocol. Personally, I donāt think we should be satisfied with that level of decentralization/democracy - itās a nice start, but we should strive for reaching at least 50% of people self-hosting an activity pub instance to truly achieve the type of decentralization that serves democracy. Of course, Iām not aware of any activity pub software that can be selfhosted by even 10% of the population, currently, so thereās definitely a lot of work to do before my vision is feasible.