[half-kh-hacker]

plainly, free our feeds are grifting.

the relay at this point is non-archival and can be spun up trivially. with a small sliding history window for subscriber catchup u can use like 32gb of scratch disk space and keep a few hours, the relay is literally just a subscribeRepos forwarder from PDSes.

the AppView is vastly more expensive to run since you need to handle the write volume of all bsky activity. if you build a non-bsky app on atproto this is a non-issue

the issue here really is that nobody writes about the state of things in long form outside the network so it's not really known how fast things move and change by those not engaged with the platform

[yellowapple]

Re: the relay, that depends on your needs. My impression from these sorts of "run a relay on an RPi" projects is that they're only dealing with a subset of the full firehose Bluesky's relay has to deal with - be it a shorter timeline (as you mention) or only concerning themselves with specific accounts (like the relay operator's own "following" feed, in the case of someone running a personal relay) or what have you. Pretty sure even Bluesky's relay doesn't try to drink from the whole firehose (or if it does, it's tolerant of "dribbling" so to speak; I recall a Bluesky dev blog post about how temporarily dropping posts from users' feeds is acceptable if the relay can't keep up).

Re: write traffic, my understanding is that the appviews shift most (if not all) of that burden to the PDSes, no?

[half-kh-hacker]

- the relay storage volume scales only with the backfill window for consumers that drop briefly - the bluesky pbc operated relays let you reconnect up to 24h later and not miss any events but that requires around 200gb of scratch disk space -- live tailing an rpi relay without dropping a connection can give you events from the full network span (ie the complete set of the firehose) without requiring any backfill window, but it's nice to use a few tens of gigabytes anyway. -- the full firehose is like 20mbps at maximum so it's far from hard to serve a few live consumers

- bluesky's feed gen post-dropping is about internal operation of their appview and not anything to do with network sync semantics

- if you're running an AppView for the bsky data you are likely keeping a copy of all bsky posts in a database, since fetching from PDSes on-the-fly is network intensive over a relatively small pipe, which is what i mean by write volume requirements.