Trying to figure this out as in the recent threads a few people said that Bluesky was federated, but it didn’t seem to actually be the case.

https://bsky.social/about/blog/02-22-2024-open-social-web in February announced that Bluesky would allow federated servers

The Bluesky documentation on the topic isn’t very clear. They mention Bluesky.social a lot, as if it’s supposed to be the one central server other PDS need to federate with:

Bluesky runs many PDSs. Each PDS runs as a completely separate service in the network with its own identity. They federate with the rest of the network in the exact same manner that a non-Bluesky PDS would. These PDSs have hostnames such as morel.us-east.host.bsky.network.

However, the user-facing concept for Bluesky’s “PDS Service” is simply bsky.social. This is reflected in the provided subdomain that users on a Bluesky PDS have access to (i.e. their default handle suffix), as well as the hostname that they may provide at login in order to route their login request to the correct service. A user should not be expected to understand or remember the specific host that their account is on.

To enable this, we introduced a PDS Entryway service. This service is used to orchestrate account management across Bluesky PDSs and to provide an interface for interacting with bsky.social accounts.

https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/entryway#account-management

Self-hosting a Bluesky PDS means running your own Personal Data Server that is capable of federating with the wider Bluesky social network.

https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds?tab=readme-ov-file#what-is-the-current-status-of-federation

The custom domain name is still something else, and does not seem to require a PDS: https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-28-2023-domain-handle-tutorial

So, to come back to the title question, do people know of an example of PDS that can be used to access Bluesky without being on the main server?

  • Boris Mann
    0•3 months ago

    @Blaze $150-$300 per month is what a relay costs for the entire 10M account network. That is extremely efficient.

    It’s also not necessary. Smoke Signal the events on ATProtoo connects to user PDS directly.

    • Blaze (he/him)OPEnglish
      2•3 months ago

      So what would happen if a billionaire buys out Bluesky and starts spreading right wing propaganda all over it?

      Completely hypothetical scenario

      • @damonEnglish
        1•2 months ago

        Same thing if some Billionaire purchased Mastodon.social & Mastodon.online. You’d have most of the fedi under their control

        • Blaze (he/him)OPEnglish
          1•2 months ago

          But then people would still be able to easily instance switch. That’s not something that is possible for Twitter

          • @damonEnglish
            1•2 months ago

            But you weren’t discussing Twitter you were discussing Bluesky. They built it with decentralised identities so that users owned their identities and can move about freely. You saying people could “easily” move to another instance isn’t reality. People already find the Fediverse too difficult, as you and I discussed under a different thread people actually care about their data which also includes their posting history. Humans by nature do not like change. People complain about Mastodon.social being too big to block. So, if people that want to block mastodon.social due to what they believe is poor content moderation but feel they can’t because of its size how likely that people would find it “easy” to move to another instance ?

            • Blaze (he/him)OPEnglish
              1•2 months ago

              Indeed, I hadn’t looked at the full context as it’s a month old thread.

              They built it with decentralised identities so that users owned their identities and can move about freely.

              From the top comment here: t

              Then, there’s the “relay”. Which to Fediverse, the only thing similar is also relays, but they work differently. On BlueSky, they relay every post and interactions of all the PDS data that connect to AppViews. I do not think there’s a choice on what is relayed, just a huge firehose. That being said, they’re not optional like Fediverse. To complete the network, relays are required on ATProto and apparently could be expensive to host, so right now, it appears the only relay is hosted by BlueSky the company. Which makes things slightly centralized.

              Could you provide an example of a relay that is not managed by Bluesky?

              You saying people could “easily” move to another instance isn’t reality. People already find the Fediverse too difficult, as you and I discussed under a different thread people actually care about their data which also includes their posting history.

              If we already discussed this, then is it worth it to go over this again?