Samuel
am very excited about Doll’s appview project. making relays non-archival was the key to making them affordable/easy to scale. Bluesky (the company)’s Bluesky obviously is archival, but for a community to run one cheaply this seems like a great way to keep costs manageable
Doll@dollspace.gay· 4 Oct 2025
The next feature is a configurable retention system. No more balooning database if you dont want it. You will be able to set the days it retains information and anything after that is pruned. You will of course be able to set it to retain all and backfill.
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Samuel
People have talked about narrow sliced networks to keep costs low - basically make the same compromises as Mastodon. It’s actually way more interesting (imo) to instead compromise on history - you’re reading fresh posts 99.9% of the time after all, and it wouldn’t break feeds like narrow appviews do
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Samuel
@samuel.fm
narrow vs shallow 🤔 a smart client could probably be clever and start hitting the PDS directly when it’s out of the archive window, then use backlinks or something to pull in old replies on demand. inefficient but the main hot path (viewing feeds) is still using the efficient atproto architecture
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Samuel
ah yeah of course, when a person logs in you could do a full backfill so they can see their own history! and so you only need to pay the cost of an archival appview for the number of users of your *app* rather than the total users of the full network
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Doll
You can do a full backfill on the whole network or configurable by days, but thats a good idea and doll will add that in too
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