this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2026
585 points (89.3% liked)
Fediverse
40460 readers
701 users here now
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, Mbin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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 Last time I checked all third-party relays only indexed some sections of the network, so my knowledge was outdated.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.