alt Hacker NewsSure, just self-host the entire thing away from Bluesky for only ~$150/month; it'll only take a few terabytes of space to do so [0]. The best part is the link at the top of that thread is broken, indicating that even the people that really care, still don't care enough to keep up with costs and maintenance.
I'm asking about every part of the full Bluesky stack because in the scenario that "Bluesky starts monetizing users" means if you self-host just part of the stack, and continue to rely on any portion of Bluesky's stack for your server... well, it's pretty obvious where the pressure and forced monetization will go to.
The above is why I'm intentionally ignoring all other threads about hosting just one portion of Bluesky. It being easy to self-host, say, a Personal Data Server, means that won't be the portion Bluesky builds monetization in to. The part of the stack that an extremely small number of people are willing and able (technically and financially) to host long-term, and are seen as good stewards worthy of users' trust, will be the part that starts abusing users.
Is there a cheaper method of self-hosting the entire stack I should look at, or is this seriously being pitched as something average home-labbers can do?
EDIT: Oh cool, it gets better. This [1] guide from ~2024 suggests an OVH server, also ringing in (at the time) at ~$150/month. Looking at the suggested configuration now, it's $367.98CAD / month. But please, tell me more about how if Bluesky needs to show an ROI, everyone'll start self-hosting PDS' and Relays
[0] https://lobste.rs/s/gsj2e2/how_self_host_all_bluesky_except_...
[1] https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/entries/Notes%20on%20Running...
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I wonder if people will ever go back to Diaspora and host their own pods. For about $40/month you can host up to about 1,500 users. I did it for a little while on a basic package for like $15/month and the directions to install are fairly straight forward and the community is really helpful.
The issue I ran into wasn't cost of hosting, it was getting people to move off whatever platform they were already on - regardless of how much better it was for controlling their own data and privacy.
He never suggested self-hosting, just moving to another provider.
That's one way in which ActivityPub wins over ATProto.
It's about as easy and cheap to self-host Mastodon, Pleroma, Misskey, etc... as it is most blog or forum software. It's only resource-intensive if you follow accounts or aggregators that post a ton of media, and even then unlikely to need more than single-digit terabytes of storage.