yeah, there are two aspects to this: what do you think is beneficial for the ecosystem, and what do people do in practice. And those are largely different things, turns out.

I think you can make a pretty good case why it would be beneficial for ecosystem development to have protocols more standardised. But that also kinda doesnt matter much, because in an open network you dont have control over what other people are doing.

Bluesky has a much more structured protocol, and much more control over their protocol and anyone in the fediverse has over activitypub. Still, the first thing that people do is tweak the protocol. The three most successful other products on atproto (tangled, streamplace and roomy) all significantly modify the protocol to fit their own needs, theoretical arguments be damned

ohh indeed some interesting recommendation system in there, thanks!

ah great, thats exactly what I was looking for. Thanks!

very curious what server you are on? im on a server with 1k active users, so not big by any measure, and manually counted the federated timeline just now, and it shows at least 50 new posts per minute. like how do you even use that? do you just watch it until an interesting account pops up on there? im very confused by this idea of using federated timeline to find people

i think the main takeaway is that the fediverse has hugely overindexed on relays being this big huge centralising force in the atproto network. And thats simply not true at all. The flipside of that is that relays also dont really matter much either. All they do is simply aggregating from a distributed network of data storage into a single firehose. Its really cool that you can do that for super cheap. but its also just a small part of the entire network architecture. like, atproto relays are not CDNs, for example, and video CDNs are expensive to run.

because hosting a full-network relay is super cheap, including bandwidth. there are multiple people who are running full-network relays (monitoring and relaying everything from every PDS) for less than 30USD per month

https://fediversereport.com/atmosphere-report-116/

There are multiple other relays running, and its pretty cheap nowadays, lowest I’ve seen is someone running a full network non-archive relay for 23usd/month

https://bsky.app/profile/edavis.dev/post/3lfdtegyzs22i

hello from piefed!

PieFed represent! Highly recommended, the ‘Topics’ feature that aggregates multiple community is super valuable to me

It is worth noting that what they posted in their business plan in July 23 (1) differs quite a bit from what Jay Graber mentioned as their business plan in an interview with The Verge in Feb 24 (2), which again differs on quite a few points from what Jay Graber mentioned in a podcast with The Verge in March 24 (3).

(1): https://bsky.social/about/blog/7-05-2023-business-plan(2): https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/6/24062837/bluesky-drops-invite-system-begins-federation-at-protocol(3): https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/25/24108872/bluesky-ceo-graber-federation-social-media-decoder-interview