AT doesn’t have this kind of issue even without Relays. This is because PDS never talks to another PDS so there’s no quadratic growth of edges. PDS only talks to apps, and there’s limited amount of apps on the network. And end users hit apps which cache stuff, so apps tend to take the user traffic hit.
Relays are helpful more on the app side because you don’t want to teach each app to crawl PDS’s and subscribe to them.
I didn’t dive into Relays in the article because they’re kind of a “next obvious optimization” but not really inherent to the model. There are other models like apps hitting shared backlink caches (like Constellation). Relay isn’t fundamental in the way hosting and apps are.
> because you don’t want to teach each app to crawl PDS’s and subscribe to them
Why not?
If I want true decentralization, that means no central component. For the same reason that communities and individuals host their own RSS readers, each community will in the end also have to host their own relay and app view.
The benefits of decentralisation, including fault-resistance and censorship-resistance, can only manifest once every community is self-hosting their own relay and app view.
Well, it's where we used to be — and it solves most of the issues of the modern web. Forums, blogs, IRC, teamspeak, gaming servers, etc, it all used to work relatively well with that approach.
> Plus, whenever I’ve gone to create an account I’ve been presented with a huge list of servers to chose from, many of which seem to be focused on a specific topic, which makes me think I need to pick which community I want to be tied to with minimal knowledge.
As you're already self-hosting ATproto anyway, why not self-host a mastodon instance as well?