Post by @innocentzero@social.tchncs.de

@innocentzero@social.tchncs.de

2026-06-20 05:24 UTC

On the other hand, the post largely glosses over the actual cost of running it, which Rob addresses above. In fact, it entirely skips relays, which are so fundamental now, and in particular, that every #atproto app effectively needs to consume one. (If your atproto app doesn't consume from a relay, it HAS an embedded relay, and in that case, god help your app's compute consumption). #atproto #bluesky

Replies (2)

@innocentzero@social.tchncs.de 2026-06-20 05:35

Having said that, and also disliking the fact that it came out of corpo billionaire creators of twitter, I genuinely believe there's some good stuff to pick up from that protocol. In particular, I think the coolest part of the architecture is server-independent (more like server-migratable) identity, which is kind of amazing. Activitypub/fediverse should adopt https://helge.codeberg.page/fep/fep/ef61/ soon, and I feel like that'd be even better than what atproto has if I understand correctly. #activitypub #fediverse #atproto #bluesky #mastodon #federated #protocols

Open ##5119993
@ricci@discuss.systems 2026-06-20 05:56

@innocentzero@social.tchncs.de Relays are often described as an optimization in the network, and I think Dan left them out out of a legitimate attempt to keep the article relatively simple and digestible. However, I would argue that they are a load-bearing optimization; in a version of the atproto network without them, running a PDS would be vastly more expensive because you'd have to be maintain open websockets to every single application (which is actually what Dan has drawn); this is fine if there are only a couple of applications, but scales poorly.

Open ##5120044