I think these are reasons that Mastodon and Nostr aren't ever going to have a critical mass of users, remaining a niche thing for people who care about the hypotheticals (which is fine). Imho, BlueSky is the only distributed social media project that has a chance of meeting users where there are with usable search, realtime discoverability, and other consequences of centralizing event-busses.

People wine about BlueSky being too centralized, but the fact is that this type of infrastructure isn't self-hostable. You can do social-media over email a la Mastodon (which admittedly is pretty great), but most people will trade that for a walled garden.

The big problem is that all this AT infra is pretty much charity, which doesn't feel sustainable. I wish it could be funded more like public libraries than ad tech.

For some context

25G < PLC postgres < 100G, depending if you want to keep all the spam operations (> 50%) and/or add extra indexes for a handle autocomplete service (like me, takes it over 100GB with everything)

Repo data (records) is in the double digit TB range (low end, without any indexing, just raw)

Blobs are in the Petabyte range.

I aim to find out current and accurate details soon.

I agree 100%

Bluesky works because people are told "Go to Bluesky" and they hide the federation. When you're told go to Mastodon and pick mastodon.social or any of the hundreds of other servers, you've lost. For some reason, the federation fans never understood this. I remember an interview with Diaspora's developers and they couldn't stop talking about how people can run their own servers.

Dude.

I have two friends who left Twitter for Bluesky. One's an HR rep and the other is a business analyst for warehouses. Does anyone think a selling point for them was that they can run their own Bluesky infrastructure?