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
Install it and use it?
Their PDS is self hosted, but it does still rely on the central relays (though you COULD host that yourself if you wanted to pay for it, I suppose?).
It’s very centralized, but it’s not that different from what you’d have to do to make Mastodon useful: a small/single user instance will get zero content, even if you follow a lot of people, without also adding several relays to work around some of the design decisions made by the Mastodon team regarding replies and how federation works for those kind of things, as well as to populate hashtags and searches and such.
Though really you shouldn’t do any of that, and just use a good platform for discussion, like a forum or a threadiverse platform. (No seriously, absolutely hate “microblog” shit because it’s designed to just be zingers and hot takes and not actual meaningful conversations.)
My guess is Bluesky never intended to be « open » and « federated » and « decentralized « as we understand it