this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2025
1512 points (98.5% liked)
Technology
69156 readers
2955 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Several people have self hosted relays. Afaik nothing that anyone has used in "production", everyone just uses the default one. I expect that will change as people figure it out, and trust in bsky pbc drops with things like the current Turkish censorship incident
Example of self hosting https://bsky.app/profile/why.bsky.team/post/3lkwg2djrfk23
The code to run a relay is here https://github.com/bluesky-social/indigo
Your "example of self hosting" is not an example of self hosting the relay, just an appview which is still being fully dependent of other Bluesky services like the relay. It's pretty unlikely that the relay would be at all practical to host on a RPi5. But even if it was the problem still remains that the network is set up in a way where self-hosting it only results in you creating your own separate bubble, not meaningfully participating in the official one.
I also doubt anyone has selfhosted relays long-term since right now there's very little purpose to that and the resource requirements are massive as well as keep growing at a fast pace in terms of the disk space required.
Can you explain what do you think "backfill" means in the context of the linked post?
Sorry if that sounds disrespectful but we kinda need to have shared definitions for stuff
Backfill means that the AppView has to request and download and then be able to present... the entire history of all posts from everyone on BlueSky.
If you are familiar with crypto, its like how you have to download either the entire blockchain, or nowadays, a trimmed down/compressed version of it... before you can interact with it.
If you are familiar with any kind of database like a forum or something... when migrating, you have to actually import a copy of all the preexisting users, posts, forum structure, posts, etc... if you want the new forum to actually contain what the old forum did, before you allow people to start making new posts.
When this rando is setting up his own AppView... he is asking the BlueSky Relays to give his AppView all the older posts, before the AppView is caught up, and can then begin to function in realtime with the rest of the network.
I don't mean to be rude, but if you genuienly don't know what 'backfill' means in this context, it is very likely you have essentially zero experience with or knowledge of systems that involve large databases ... it is a very common and well known term to anyone with basically over a year of doing most kinds of db admin/server admin work.
yeah that was my bad I might be a little stupid.
I got confused between the relay crawling pdses to store their records for retransmission vs an appview storing records for serving them to clients. Both involve processing similar (v large) amounts of data, but the latter is actually more expensive because you're also transforming the data to make it useful to clients, so it's still neat they got it working on a raspberry pi
They have said that in production, their appview takes up about 30 servers while the relay takes only one. Apologies for the rude tone of the post https://bsky.app/profile/why.bsky.team/post/3lku2o3n6es22