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How so? Have you guys determined how much it would cost monthly to run your own PDS node or whatever? Because that guy is talking about it like you paying a couple bucks like you would for a web host. I was thinking of it more like an entire Mastodon instance with potentially thousands of users.

I don't know the exact numbers but actually, yeah, an atproto pds is designed to be fairly cheap to run, for the same reasons this person is talking about

bryan newbold

@bnewbold.net

don't want to over-promise, but you can run a smol PDS for like $5-10/month and can probably fit a couple dozen friends on that, if they aren't all top-1% prolific. over time image storage could creep up, but can put that in blob storage (eg, S3) pretty cheap. video could be a whole other story

29/2/24, 11:39 pm2 reposts20 likes

yeah. another factor that could increase the costs is if we introduce the private comms layer at the PDS level

shreyan (wise)

@shreyanjain.net

Private comms at the PDS could get... weird

what are you thinking of?

shreyan (wise)

@shreyanjain.net

Since it's private data and only the PDS should have access to it that makes adversarial exit a little more complicated than it is for public data

Kuba Suder 🇵🇱🇺🇦

@mackuba.eu

I'm pretty sure I saw at least one or two PDSes running on RPis already

Thomas Dickerson

@elfprince13.mumak.app

I’ve been running a personal Mastodon instance for a while and it started at <$1 / month but has crept up substantially to about $6/month now

Nosfrogtu

How many users are on it?

Thomas Dickerson

@elfprince13.mumak.app

There’s me and my admin account which doesn’t post or follow so technically 2 but 1 for all practical questions of resource usage

ernesto

@ernesto.bsky.social

it's a great use case for the erlang BEAM, really maximize the concurrent users per box

Orual

@nonbinary.computer

@hex.foo, @shreyanjain.net, and several others are working on an Elixir-based PDS.

ernesto

@ernesto.bsky.social

ah, excellent! i'd be very happy to help

I still think erlang was the greatest language of all time (but I'm a dist sys nerd so that tracks)

Micah ΘΔ

@bigfluffy.dog

Are you an erlang purist or is elixir okay too?

elixer's got some great features and is the right choice for modern software, but I love the erlang vibe personally

BEAM-pilled

Woah I think we're soul mates

woaoh

What do you run it on? A VPS or does it need to be some kind of cloud worker thing?

Jaz

@jaz.sh

You can run one on an OVH Cloud VLE-2 no sweat for $5.50/mo (2 vCPU, 2GB RAM, 40gb storage, 500mbps link (no bandwidth cap)) Incredibly good deal and more than enough for self-hosting a PDS for you and a few friends.

Jaz

@jaz.sh

Actual usage and bandwidth on a PDS depends on utilization. A PDS doesn't need to "sync" data from other PDSs or anything like that, it fetches what it needs on-demand from the AppView when your app makes a request to load your timeline or something. Only BW usage is to emit events on the firehose.

doesnt the PDS also proxy your requests to the appview?

Jaz

@jaz.sh

And also BW is used for serving blobs on first reference to the AppView before it caches them in the CDN after which anyone who wants your blobs will most likely talk to the content-addressed CDN and not directly to your PDS.

Nosfrogtu

Someone was trying to explain this all to me, but the layout of a federated social media network is a bit complex for me. I was more interested in seeing some actual feedback from ppl who have run themselves & what the stats/usage of the machines they used were over a month or w/e

Andres BOO SCARE-O 👻@andreslucero.com

My understanding is that Relays take the majority of incoming requests, as they cache data from your PDS and provide the firehose for AppViews: bsky.social/about/blog/5...

Samuel

@samuel.fm

I used the second-cheapest Vultr VPS and it’s a breeze to get set up

Nosfrogtu

Could you share your stats for however long you've been running it? How much bandwidth it uses, file space, CPU/RAM anything else. Do you run it for yourself or multiple people?

Samuel

@samuel.fm