The Bsky Relay costs are because it's the primary relay, sure, but any relay aiming to handle a mass amount of people, as well as a variety of AppViews, will likely scale similarly in costs. This is because to try to minimize any fragmentation of experience (as one may see with ActivityPub), AT protocol relays act as a central mirror of all the personal data servers connecting to them.

It's baked into the architecture for the most part, despite some later developments of lighter pseudo-relays that try to reduce some of the overhead. From the outset they've said they only really see there being a few large-scale relays due to the operational costs.

[–] auraithx@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

Relay costs like 300$/mo to run and there’s a light versions you can sync too. Not exactly a blocker.

[–] Supernova1051@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I'm interested in running one. any services you can link to that are that cheap?

[–] airportline@lemm.ee 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

ATProto is not nearly as mature as ActivityPub. Businesses are only just now launching ATProto services (Graze being among the first notable ones).

There is a blog post from a dev about running a relay.

load more comments (1 replies)