Comment by wmf
2 years ago
nobody at Bluesky has a clear idea why anyone else would ever run a relay other than for the good of society ... I don't think Bluesky's own incentives, nor the incentives that they are laying out with this design, are particularly fantastic for the health of the network they are building.
I fully agree with this but I'm giving Bluesky a lot of benefit of the doubt because I think Mastodon has even worse incentives and I can't come up with anything better. (I can come up with different tradeoffs but they always leave somebody pissed off.)
Getting back to the Japan problem, I think "content we care about is blocked on the main relay" should be enough incentive to run an alternate relay and maybe a patched client. Obviously there's a bootstrapping issue there but you could say the same about Bluesky vs. Mastodon and yet here we are millions of users later.
I do like Bluesky's take on identity in particular. Mastodon is pretty catastrophic in the way that identity works, and AT proto offers some really compelling ideas here. That said, I don't know. I desperately hope for Bluesky to succeed, because some of the ideas would be great in an ideal world where they've got it all figured out, but I hope that the resources necessary to run relays winds up being a lot less than its made out to be. Otherwise, if it really does require massive amounts of resources, I just can't see anyone choosing to do this. For Japan, I think it is much more likely they would pour resources into domestic SNS services like Misskey.io, as Skeb, Inc recently did.