How does the network incentivize participants to join? #1870
Replies: 2 comments 6 replies
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Having thought about the same question, here's my 2 cents. By the way, BGSes have recently been renamed to Relays. Running a PDS is relatively cheap and easy - very accessible to enthusiasts, volunteers, or other benevolent orgs. The question for Relays is harder to answer. A Relay that only crawls a subset of PDSes (e.g. tracking only the repos of your local social graph) is doable at hobbyist scale, but a full-network Relay is going to be expensive. Bluesky PBC is hosting "the" bluesky Relay for now, but hopefully other orgs join them in running more. I'm not sure what the incentives for that are though, beyond sheer benevolence :/ |
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PDS: intention is for it to be pretty cheap and commodity for most accounts. Self-organized hosting is possible (via social connections, or small payment), or free hosting could be easily subsidized by larger hosting services (freemium, to encourage network growth, etc). There are privacy and "in whose interest" benefits to having a PDS host who has incentives aligned with users. Relay: the underlying motivation is reliable bulk access to network content. App (AppView) developers and operators in particular will want reliable Relay access. They could run their own, or pay for an SLA (and support, etc) from an existing Relay. The existence of multiple full-network Relays to meet these needs seems a safe bet. The harder question is "who would give away Relay firehose access to hackers for free". For an already-sustainable Relay, the additional per-subscriber cost should always be a small fraction of resource cost, so a degree of subsidy seems likely (especially if it increases the value of the overall network). The marginal cost of providing the firehose could approach the marginal cost of consuming it (if just pure bandwidth). Tons of no-cost subscribers could end up being a substantial cost some day. One model could be cloud platforms giving no-cost subsidized access to consumers, similar to DNS or AWS S3 "public datasets". Or a mirror network of public-interest fan-out nodes that re-broadcast a firehose, similar to linux package distro mirror networks. Most likely some combination of models. |
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As answered here...
I am wondering how the network would incentivize PDS and
BGSRelay providers to join and stay in the network in terms of protocol adoption? Or maybe the hardware requirement would be fairly low and network could be bootstraped by a group of enthusiasts? Or all the infra are already being taken care of by an organization?Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
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