Is it possible for a relay to filter individual posts, or do the Merkle trees prevent that? (They would if they need to be signed by the originating user.)
I'm part of a marginalised group that is often considered to be illegal in many countries, or at the very least, very off-putting. (In 50 years, perhaps, things will change and we will be more accepted. To be specific, it's a grey area in the U.S.)
I'm interested in BlueSky but the relays are a worrying "point of failure" if they can just block me from there. I'll be more interested if there are multiple relays that I can use in parallel, with at least one being friendly to us, so I can still participate. Currently on the Fediverse it mostly works since we can connect directly to other servers, and there's no SPOF. But I would love to use BlueSky due to the better protocol design! Just more relays would be good.
... Wait, can we self host relays? And is it plausible for a community to do that? I couldn't find anything about it.
You can host your own relay but if you want accurate likes/replies/etc you need to crawl the entire Bluesky which could be quite expensive in the future.
