disclaimer: these instances are new and i'm not an expert at running relays / low-level atproto infra, this is experimental!!

i'm a firehose consumer

my "bsky trending topics" (called coral) implementation consumes jetstream to get the posts one can try to derive trending topics from

my standard.site index has tap ingest and backfill posts and pubs from atmospheric blogs pckt.blog, leaflet.pub, offprint.app etc

historically, these have ultimately depended on bsky infrastructure: jetstream*.bsky.network + relay*.bsky.network respectively.

now they use jetstream.waow.tech + relay.waow.tech respectively

coral reads bsky posts via jetstream + pub-search taps this relay

importantly, tap needs listReposByCollection which runs as a sidecar service seemingly not offered by prominent indie relays (unless i am missing something which i totally may be)

since bsky appears to push the image for collectiondir to a private registry, i built my own image for that and put it on atcr.io so tap can happily update itself on who has new collections it cares about

i have only started backfilling this tho! still thinking (and getting feedback) on this part, seems like there's a offline crawler thing i could run, but without the complete backfill it seems like tap is still not practically going to work as advertised

EDIT: it seems there's some prior discussion on this in the atproto /microcosm discord i only realized after i started working on this, around whether you can circumvent collectiondir etc, will be looking at this as i think about how/if i'm going to go network scale

i have a single-node k3s cluster in Virginia, USA via Hetzner that serve the relay, jetstream, and collectiondir behind traefik. i'll have to see about resource allocations given all the things i am running

ideally, the idea of checking coral and/or pub-search now to eyeball whether my relay infra is working (obviously not a completely reliable proxy, but a useful / quick smoke check!) is attractive

but for less-vibey observabililty, i have a public read-only grafana:

i encourage people to use these for non-critical things! tell me if it violates your expectations anyhow, that'd be much appreciated :)

i'm still learning atproto's lower levels, which i do by trying things!

here's the code, which reflects my very lazy declarative goals:

relay w listReposByCollection support on minimal Hetzner single node k8s ~ inspired by Bryan Newbold's $34 dollar relay blog post

.. i kinda like k8s sometimes 🫢 i'm sorry! i may reassess and very open to suggestions on different deployment topologies folks use irl. seems i'm on track to spend around the <= $34 per month? we'll see

i ended up adding listReposByCollection because of tap in pub-search but just now realized this subject had intersected with (what appears to be related to) the atproto hit-piece discourse earlier on

Evan Jarrett

@evan.jarrett.net

5d

As of now, my biggest concern is the plc directory. And the fact that only the bluesky relays support listReposByCollection. If a third party relay could support that I shouldn’t need bluesky relay. And if we could use something like a did:web that could be moved to a different url

1

1

that reminded me i ran (naively) into that with tap a while ago, so i was able to connect the dots and put up a pod with that sidecar

🙇🏻‍♂️ ty

@bad-example.com

and

@sri.xyz

for (afaik) leading the way!

OG independent relays