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?
I think they do but they use AT protocol (theirs) instead of ActivityPub so that’s why you don’t see them in mastodon and they don’t have many servers in federation
Indeed, but I’m a bit surprised there isn’t any list of alternatives servers.
I would have to look more into the protocol specification, but it seems like this isn’t really federation, alternative servers are still relying on the central server, and that’s why nobody bothers with setting one up
There are some people hosting their own identity server, but yes the centralisation of the main aggregator server seems to be by design as they even scare people away from trying by talking about the high resource requirements of doing so.
IMHO Bluesky is only federated in the sense that responsibility for content and moderation can be outsourced, but the user endpoint stays mostly in control of Bluesky. This makes a lot of sense if you think about it from a company perspective… outsource the legally and personnel critical parts and keep the ones that are lucrarive for advertisement and can be easily scaled by throwing hardware at it.
But you must be a real sucker to take them up on that very one sided offer…
Why would someone host a server and pay for it out of their own pocket, when the protocol just turns in to an invisible piece of infrastructure that people don’t even know exists?
AP instances allow for communities and identity to build around them, so there is a non monetary incentive to running them, but what’s the incentive to run an equivalent on bluesky and make it public?
Definitely, that’s why I guess there are still no other server than Bluesky’s
@Blaze @ada @fediverse There is a small number of personal PDSes, plus Bridgy’s one: https://blue.mackuba.eu/directory/pdses, but right now there aren’t really any public open-signup ones, because they’re limiting them to 10 users per PDS in this phase (I mean you can create more, but they won’t be seen by the Bluesky relay). They implied that the network/software is not yet ready for this yet at this point, because a lot of things are still in flux (e.g. they’re adding OAuth now).
That sounds like a really dumb design idea. Why make a federating protocol if you still rely on the server? I don’t even get why they did it at all then.
That’s indeed very interesting and peculiar.
@hoshikarakitaridia @Blaze @fediverse I think the main reason is that this solves a lot of UX problems that Fedi has because of its architecture, things like:
- thread comments, like counts, follower lists not being consistent between instances
- not being able to easily interact with content that’s not already cached on your instance
- user/post search not working globally, for the same reasonOn Bluesky, the AppView indexes all that, and you load threads, feeds and do search through there.
Thank you for all the info! Been wondering about various things.
Zooming back, it feels like both the fedi and bluesky aren’t fully resolved yet and might influence each other and a possible further replacement.
For example, I like the PDS/repository idea and think it would help make migrating easier in the fedi. But I would like more granular control over what is shared to relays as opposed to everything.
@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.
So what would happen if a billionaire buys out Bluesky and starts spreading right wing propaganda all over it?
Completely hypothetical scenario
Same thing if some Billionaire purchased Mastodon.social & Mastodon.online. You’d have most of the fedi under their control
I have setup bskysocial.world to test that (there’s no web interface, just select this domain when logging in or signing up via the app or https://bsky.app/)
Note: This is for testing only, I can’t promise it will remain running.
(I am @ruud.bskysocial.world)
Thank you Ruud!
If I understand correctly, using a custom domain name still makes you use the central Bluesky server, right?
No, it doesn’t have to. Custom domain does not tied to any instances (PDS) you reside in. The way custom domain handle works is for the verification itself.
The first time you’ve created your account to that instance, you’ve been given to a specific instance name to your handle. For example “user.bskysocial.world”. With the “user” acts as a subdomain and “bskysocial.world” as a PDS name.
You can learn more of how the handles work in ATProto here:
https://atproto.com/specs/handleYou can still change your handle to however you’d like without having to migrate it to another PDS using your own domain name.
Every component in the ATProto (Handles, PDS, AppView, Relays, etc) are separated from each other and can be run individually, without having to cause massive interference to one another. I kind of think of it as a “Microservices” in ATProto, whilst ActivityPub is more like a “Monolithic” one.
