How about, less than what many people pay for a tank of gas?

Most people won't do it, but they don't have to, and it's not a particularly expensive hobby.

I think that's unfair because most people won't run their own relays any time soon, but rather rely on a local enthusiast.

If $30 a month is too much for you, then you probably should be doing something other than trying to run a relay. It is just not a significant amount of money.

Most people reading this, then

Because if you want to relay every single public event for every single user on the entire atproto network in real-time to many consuming apps and services… that's gonna cost something. Not that it costs a lot, but to expect what a relay does to be infinitely cheap is to not understand what it's doing or why it's doing it.

That's for a server that downloads and forwards all Bluesky traffic.

This isn't about "average user". Relays have nothing to do with using atproto as a user. They're about developers making new apps.

By "most people" it's implied we're talking about most people who want to run a web app in their spare time. Do you mean a different definition? If you want to run a web app (which is the only reason you'd want a relay) and you're able to pool with ten other developers who want to do the same, you can make the cost to $3/mo. Is that feasible? What do you normally pay for web app hosting?

And again, if you're a hobbyist developer, you'd just use a community relay that already exists and is free. I assume that, if you want to run your own, you have a specific reason to do so.

I view Bluesky as being decentralized-optional. It's cool because you actually can join first and wrap your head around it later. You can continue using your account you created on the fully 1st-party stack, and you still have the option to switch to self-hosting the parts you care about, without losing your posts or followers.

- If you just want to use your domain name as a username, you set a DNS record.

- If what you care about is the client, you can build your own website or native app. You don't really even need to host a server other than for your own static assets, since the app can request Bluesky network data directly via the logged-in user's PDS (they even have CORS headers!)

- If what you care about is data sovereignty, you can self host your PDS (personal data server) on a low-end VPS. It's cheap because it pretty much just holds your data, passes events to Relays, and proxies data requests to your preferred AppView.

- If what you care about is not needing to trust Bluesky to reliably gather and collate events from each PDS, then you'd need to host a Relay ($30/month) and an AppView (even more expensive) so you'd be best off pooling resources with other people you trust. But that's kind of the nuclear option.

- With a narrower scope though: if you noticed that Bluesky was censoring a handful of legitimate accounts and you still wanted to follow them, I think you could probably have a personal Relay+AppView that only listens to the censored accounts' PDS's, and proxies other requests to the 1st party AppView. (I'm not 100% sure if that would be allowed.)

>"Most people" cannot afford $30 /month. And of those who can, most of those cannot afford the time and effort required to run a relay.

I don't think that was a recommendation for people to do, but to demonstrate that it doesn't require much in the way of resources. That VM could probably host hundreds of people, since relays scale and de-dupe shared content.

If someone said that email or a personal website was inexpensive and could be hosted on a cheap VM, I don't think you'd make a comment like the above dismissing it as impractical: the idea is that if it's that cheap, then there are people that can host cheap/free (maybe ad supported) relays, similar to how cheap/free webmail exists today.

> "Most people" cannot afford $30 /month. And of those who can, most of those cannot afford the time and effort required to run a relay.

??? that's not the point. the goal isn't that some non-technical 40 year old will run their own relay. the goal is that relays will be cheap enough to run that there can be hundreds of relays for developers of apps to choose from.

relays are DEVELOPER facing only, meaning the developer of the app chooses which to use, and can even use none at all and build the functionality of the relay into their app itself.

no matter where your account is hosted, it will be crawled by every relay (unless it's banned from some of them) so users or people who "don't have the bandwidth to think about this" don't have to worry about relays at all. anyone who will ACTUALLY BENEFIT from an independently hosted relay (app dev) will perceive them as an incredibly marginal cost.

> This is because I do not have the time or mental bandwidth to even pick an "instance" that would be better suited to me and migrate, let alone run my own.

Idk what to say to that. So I'll just say that you can run `npm create pds` and have a single-user PDS hosted for free on Cloudflare in minutes.

But I think what you meant to say (stop me if I'm wrong) isn't that you don't have the "mental bandwidth", it's more that you (and the average user) don't actually _want_ to migrate because there's no tangible benefit.

To this I would say: migration is not the path to spreading users out across instances at a large scale. Migration to me is more of an insurance against a service going down or turning evil. The real way to get people to spread out across different PDSes is to make it so there are more "entry points" to the atmosphere, so more people are onboarded to the atmosphere in more places other than Bluesky, where they can sign up and automatically be on another instance. If more independent atproto apps are created with their own PDSes for onboarding, that's what will solve the problem imo, not encouraging users to migrate (although that can also be done at smaller scales, as Blacksky and Eurosky have proven)

An average user does not need to run their own node for decentralization to work. It just needs to be cheap and easy enough for enough of technical users to run