alfredon996

The appview needs to index the relay contents to build a view of the whole network, the relay is just a type of CDN, and is NOT that expensive. There are multiple individuals maintaining full copies right now, while the network is at double digit millions of users. The relay is by far less expensive.

Great, but how much do these people pay to maintain a relay of the entire network? I bet a lot more than for a fediverse server that only has to maintain a small fraction of the whole network.

There is another problem: these other relays are all copies of the Bluesky relay, where the official app publishes the messages of its users, so they are not independent from each other; if I publish my posts on a relay other than Bluesky’s I will not be able to communicate with them.

The relay is very expensive, it collects and receives messages from the whole network.

The appview it’s not the problem, that’s just an user of the relay.

See this article

Essentially it’s a centralized platform. Independent PDS cannot work without a big expensive relay managed by a large corporation