Bluesky, decentralisation, and the distribution of power Bluesky has seen a large inflow of new users following the results of the US election, and a significant amount of media attention as well. All that attention to Bluesky has also led to a renewed conversation around the question of whether Bluesky is decentralised or not. The terms decentralisation and federation are used in multiple ways: to describe the technological architecture details of an internet protocol, but just as often as a sh...
Ok. I want to host my own Bluesky and interact with the bsky.app instance. How?
The article is all about excuses.
all you have to do is
host your own PDS, where your account lives, this is easy, I do it myself already.
host you own appview: the only actually good appview is bsky’s, luckily it’s open source, unfortunately I do not believe they made it easy to self-host.
Host a relay, this isn’t all that hard, it just needs a real big server (AFAIK it needs a shitton of io throughput), so unless you’re very rich it’s not too realistic to host this.
So yeah, a PDS is easy to host but the other two parts are a pain, and since the protocol has only been open for a few months, people haven’t really done too much.
Frontpage exists, but they haven’t made it be able to interact with bsky.Social, although the accounts are shared. I have been told by people involved with that that that’s an issue with frontpage’s implementation, and not the AT protocol
My guess is Bluesky never intended to be « open » and « federated » and « decentralized « as we understand it