Sure, just self-host the entire thing away from Bluesky for only ~$150/month; it'll only take a few terabytes of space to do so [0]. The best part is the link at the top of that thread is broken, indicating that even the people that really care, still don't care enough to keep up with costs and maintenance.
I'm asking about every part of the full Bluesky stack because in the scenario that "Bluesky starts monetizing users" means if you self-host just part of the stack, and continue to rely on any portion of Bluesky's stack for your server... well, it's pretty obvious where the pressure and forced monetization will go to.
The above is why I'm intentionally ignoring all other threads about hosting just one portion of Bluesky. It being easy to self-host, say, a Personal Data Server, means that won't be the portion Bluesky builds monetization in to. The part of the stack that an extremely small number of people are willing and able (technically and financially) to host long-term, and are seen as good stewards worthy of users' trust, will be the part that starts abusing users.
Is there a cheaper method of self-hosting the entire stack I should look at, or is this seriously being pitched as something average home-labbers can do?
EDIT: Oh cool, it gets better. This [1] guide from ~2024 suggests an OVH server, also ringing in (at the time) at ~$150/month. Looking at the suggested configuration now, it's $367.98CAD / month. But please, tell me more about how if Bluesky needs to show an ROI, everyone'll start self-hosting PDS' and Relays
That's one way in which ActivityPub wins over ATProto.
It's about as easy and cheap to self-host Mastodon, Pleroma, Misskey, etc... as it is most blog or forum software. It's only resource-intensive if you follow accounts or aggregators that post a ton of media, and even then unlikely to need more than single-digit terabytes of storage.
> It's only resource-intensive if you follow accounts or aggregators that post a ton of media, and even then unlikely to need more than single-digit terabytes of storage.
The exact same thing can be said about running an ATProto AppView vs a PDS.
I wonder if people will ever go back to Diaspora and host their own pods. For about $40/month you can host up to about 1,500 users. I did it for a little while on a basic package for like $15/month and the directions to install are fairly straight forward and the community is really helpful.
The issue I ran into wasn't cost of hosting, it was getting people to move off whatever platform they were already on - regardless of how much better it was for controlling their own data and privacy.
Great! And this provider will just... eat the server, bandwidth, and storage costs, indefinitely, with no expectation of financial renumeration? Or will they charge a minimal fee that few social media users will be willing to pay?
My point stands: Hosting a full Bluesky stack is big money, every month. And that ignores how the admin must be seen in a positive light; having deep pockets isn't enough, the admin team running (and paying for) the servers must be trusted not to manipulate what gets seen, who gets banned, and what links are deemed malicious.
$150/month is a lot of money, but split just 100 ways, that's $1.50/month. If the user base is too expensive, emotionally, to do free server administration for, well, why would you want to do that job then at all? Which speaks volumes.
It's the payment onboarding that's usually the sticking point (which is fortunate for my side of the discussion, because you've missed a zero), but that also misses that hosting costs will almost certainly scale with user-count.
And I'm not discussing emotionally-heavy, but public standing within the community you've convinced to trust you with their social media algorithm
In your view, contrary to the lobster.rs post, running the server should instead cost $1,500/month and goes up exponentially to support a handful of users. Have I got you right?
How is having a good public standing to a very vocal minority about modern day sensitive topics not a high emotional cost to bear?
Voluntary hierarchy is different from autocracy. If the community really felt Linux was better worthy Linus, they could make that happen. Linus isn't operating secret police that scare the shit out of people.
> I would happily use the phone I had 10 years ago
> There is no such thing on the market now
Good news, the ~12-year-old BlackBerry Q20 is back, and shipping, [0] with an updated motherboard. It's a real product, not vaporware; I have two. It has a headphone jack, a small form-factor, removable micro-SD card slot, and a battery that takes little more than a guitar pick and #0 Philips screwdriver to replace.
Parts are cheap as hell as well, with a new screen costing under $25USD, and replacement keyboards under $30.
There's multiple clean sheet designs [1,2] of similar devices as well.
Though I expect them to be treated like fun little runabout cars: made for (typically young) people that can't justify the cost, leaving nobody to buy them, who then bemoan their discontinuation... due to poor sales
If America had launched nukes during the cold war, the USSR would retaliate. Maybe via submarine-launched ICBM, maybe using a dead man's switch; methodology is irrelevant, because the question is this: If both countries end up radioactive desert, which country would be declared the winner? Or is it possible for neither country to be the definitive winner of a war?
> Why is the automatic assumption that it was malicious?
Because the business model is malicious.
Meta has, quite intentionally, wedged itself in-between large amounts of human interaction. They know some people are malicious. They know the machine will frequently make the wrong call, because the auto-moderator can neither reason, nor account for context.
But hiring enough moderators to run moderation through the computer, provide a default "suggested" action, and having a human approve or deny, would be too expensive. It would demolish their profit, and may even pull Meta from black to red, financially. Their business model relies on making the wrong call, and having outrage bring it to the attention of actual Meta staff to correct it.
Meta does not get to blame the computer they put in charge of moderation instead of hiring adequate staff; computers can never be held accountable, so accountability moves up the chain to the people that programmed the computer and left it in charge.
Meta isn't blaming anything, it's the process. And no process will be perfect, thats the 'damnd if you do/don't'
This is only going to be serious to people who care about the subject itself and maybe any actual harm done in those 90 minutes, which I see as nothing.
How much did they spend on Metaverse? I hope I'm not just throwing out figures irresponsibly, feel free to fact check me, but I heard one figure of 80 billion? I mean, it was enough to rebrand their entire 'business' (bullshit pivot; extortion) around
Zuck recently bought a castle. I bet none of his vast wealth goes to improving his platforms
> My feeling is that the engineers and OEMs understand these tradeoffs better than the hobby market. All of those boring pastes that came in OEM configurations but underperformed the latest $20 tube you could buy in the aftermarket were just making different tradeoffs
For example, if a consumer is going to periodically (or ever) replace / upgrade their thermal paste, they can get a bump in performance. The consumer that's never going to do that is better server by paste that has slightly lower performance, but lasts much longer.
Peak performance alone will not imbue something with a soul, and adding (or adding additional) computers frequently seems to overlap with something becoming more soulless.
An SSD is faster, but a hard drive ticking away is a language its own, and an amorphous white-by-default Tesla Plaid may be one of the fastest cars on any road, but odds are the only feeling it evokes is "This is faster than any reasonable person needs, and likely more than is safe for any standard American motorist to be able to just go out and buy"
> There should be a rule that any assertion of conspiracy must at least have some evidence.
Broadly, I agree, and good grief do I wish people would follow this more often. But Google specifically has acted incredibly anti-competitively for several years now [0], especially regarding Android. This has gone on for such a long time that they have, in my mind, lost the benefit of any doubt.
As they continue to lock down Android [1], things that would have once been met with a "Wait and see" approach are instead met with suspicion and a default assumption that it's primarily (though not typically exclusively) done to serve their own interests.
So generally, yes! That which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. However, Google's history is all the evidence I need to assume their actions are not done in good faith.
I'm asking about every part of the full Bluesky stack because in the scenario that "Bluesky starts monetizing users" means if you self-host just part of the stack, and continue to rely on any portion of Bluesky's stack for your server... well, it's pretty obvious where the pressure and forced monetization will go to.
The above is why I'm intentionally ignoring all other threads about hosting just one portion of Bluesky. It being easy to self-host, say, a Personal Data Server, means that won't be the portion Bluesky builds monetization in to. The part of the stack that an extremely small number of people are willing and able (technically and financially) to host long-term, and are seen as good stewards worthy of users' trust, will be the part that starts abusing users.
Is there a cheaper method of self-hosting the entire stack I should look at, or is this seriously being pitched as something average home-labbers can do?
EDIT: Oh cool, it gets better. This [1] guide from ~2024 suggests an OVH server, also ringing in (at the time) at ~$150/month. Looking at the suggested configuration now, it's $367.98CAD / month. But please, tell me more about how if Bluesky needs to show an ROI, everyone'll start self-hosting PDS' and Relays
[0] https://lobste.rs/s/gsj2e2/how_self_host_all_bluesky_except_...
[1] https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/entries/Notes%20on%20Running...