It is a social network so I'm not sure what the issue about yes needing to read the network is. There are really good relays designed to help aggregate and filter the network. They can run on $5 VPS, processing the entire network, which is awesomely cheap, not just Tangled, which is awesome, what I would call a huge win. Paul has a talk on designing for scalability, about how it's possible to have such small boxes doing the network aggregation with so little resources, that appviews can then consume their interests from. solving for scale in open social networks, https://youtu.be/BoJnj2yPf14

The servers are definitely not keeping the whole network. The post talks to this some, but the new Knot2 retains a local copy of repo-relevant material (comments prs etc) in its own git tree, that collects what the network has done together, and makes it easy to ship/replicate, while also using that as a sync source to replicate back into atproto too, to make network visible.

Agreed that I really wish ForgeFed were showing much more clear progress. It seems like such a good idea, but it's been a number of years now and it's super murky what the progress is and where we are. Having >1 viable player in the decentralization of forges would be great. I haven't checked in a bit but I do read Forgejo release notes and my impression is it's been a very slow trickle.