Whether it soon becomes possible to self host an AppView, the one remaining centralized component will tell us a lot about where it’s headed.
There are already smaller appviews that use the existing hosting/authentication infra, but bypassing the bsky appview aggregation. Nothing with any real scale but for example there is a barebones reddit/hackernews equivalent https://frontpage.fyi/
That’s interesting. This post had suggested it isn’t yet possible to host an AppView. It seems the reality is more complex.
That post refers to hosting an appview that does all the same things as the official bsky (the service) one, which involves a ton of storage and bandwidth and processing (for everyone’s recommendations, notifications, and all the other moving parts), and is closed source to boot.
Frontpage.fyi is a lot cheaper simply because its used by like 50 people tops.
