alt Hacker NewsAs far as I can tell, Relays[1] are the glue that makes ATProto work performantly. I think they're supposed to be content-agnostic — they just shuttle data through, reducing the number of services each AppView needs to be aware of.
As the blog mentions, the big improvement vs Mastodon is that Relays, AppViews and PDSes are separate services with their own distinct scaling demands. It's a rather beautiful solution to a system design problem.
Replies
RobotToaster • today at 5:38 PM
They do remove content directly from relays. They claim they only remove content that is illegal to host, but I don't know how true that is, and there is always the risk it could change in the future.
https://docs.bsky.app/blog/blueskys-moderation-architecture#...
➕ show 2 replies
Yeah, Relays are one way to do that. I've mostly skipped them because they're an invisible optimization and there are other strategies. E.g. many smaller apps today rely on Constellation (https://constellation.microcosm.blue/) instead of building their own database index, so they don't use a Relay at all.