Good to know there’s a second full-network relay (assuming this is what it is). Last time I checked all third-party relays only indexed some sections of the network, so my knowledge was outdated.
Conceptually relays are the indexers of the network, you can view individual PDSes without them, but you won’t get cross-PDS discovery; this is because PDSes don’t actually federate with each other.
This means that in practice, relays define what it means to be “on bluesky”. If you are banned on all relays, your PDS becomes just a weird standalone microblog.
This is different from the fediverse, where all instances federate with each other by default and relays just enhance discoverability and connectivity, rather than being the only way to do it.
And in any case this is all a bit academic, bluesky are hosting nazis on their own PDS, bsky.social.
There’s another relay: https://atproto.africa/ .
Relays don’t index posts, they collect them from different servers, and provide a “firehouse” of events.
You can crawl pdses directly, akin to the fediverse. AppViewLite does this (and is lightweight enough to run on a phone).
You don’t need a relay or appview with https://reddwarf.app/ .
The fediverse also has relays.
Good to know there’s a second full-network relay (assuming this is what it is). Last time I checked all third-party relays only indexed some sections of the network, so my knowledge was outdated.
Conceptually relays are the indexers of the network, you can view individual PDSes without them, but you won’t get cross-PDS discovery; this is because PDSes don’t actually federate with each other.
This means that in practice, relays define what it means to be “on bluesky”. If you are banned on all relays, your PDS becomes just a weird standalone microblog.
This is different from the fediverse, where all instances federate with each other by default and relays just enhance discoverability and connectivity, rather than being the only way to do it.
And in any case this is all a bit academic, bluesky are hosting nazis on their own PDS, bsky.social.