About Bluesky and federation:
Edit: There might be some mistakes, and my information could be outdated, but the point still stands - Bluesky wasn't built on 100% federation from the start.
I've been wondering about Bluesky's decentralization again. I can't think of any reason why I'd want to self-host Bluesky in its current form. I cannot 100% self host "my own Bluesky".
Their main selling points for building their own protocol were easier migration and better discoverability, but right now there's no simple way to migrate my Bluesky account to my own instance. And hosting the centralized parts yourself isn't really possible, or if it were, not affordable, they haven't made that feasible, by design, it seems.
Even if you self-host a PDS, Bluesky's Relay only indexes up to 10 accounts from it. You can run more, but they won't federate, the central infrastructure decides what gets seen. They control this (source: docs.bsky.app/blog/self-host-f….). You can self-host a PDS (Personal Data Server), but you still depend on Bluesky's centralized Relay and AppView. There's no production-ready alternative infrastructure from what I gather.
It feels like I'd be renting a room in a hotel that someone else is running anyway, when I want my own hotel.
If Mastodon gGmbH vanishes tomorrow, my instance keeps running and federating with everyone else. If Bluesky PBC vanishes, the ecosystem would need to scramble to stand up replacement infrastructure that doesn't really exist yet.
ATProto keeps getting evaluated on its promises while other systems get evaluated on their merits. The "portability" selling point depends on infrastructure that isn't mature enough to actually catch you if Bluesky falls.
I trust W3C, the builders and fathers of the World Wide Web, ActivityPub and the Fediverse.
#Decentralization #SelfHosting #SelfHosted #Mastodon #Fediverse #Bluesky #Servers
Early Access Federation for Self-Hosters
For a high-level introduction to data federation, as well as a comparison to other federated social protocols, check out the Bluesky blog.docs.bsky.app
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John Ahlroos
in reply to Roni Rolle Laukkarinen • • •Nicely put.
This is the reason I went with Mastodon in 2022 and still not regretting it.
Ralph Brandi
in reply to Roni Rolle Laukkarinen • • •Emil Jacobs - Collectifission
in reply to Roni Rolle Laukkarinen • • •This neatly sums up why, every time a BS fan was talking about federation, I just didn't get it. Now I understand they were only pretending to talk about federation, or perhaps worse, talk about some twisted definition of 'federation'. That's why I simply didn't understand them. They were talking about something else entirely, while claiming "federation" at the same time.
Gaslighting by design?
Roni Rolle Laukkarinen
Unknown parent • • •RE: toot.cafe/@thereisnocat/115906…
@zotheca So I've heard. But there are challenges.
mementomori.social/@thereisnoc…
Memento mori
mementomori.socialRalph Brandi
2026-01-16 19:09:50
Stefan Bohacek
in reply to Roni Rolle Laukkarinen • • •Well, the problem is that vast majority of people don't care about this.
*But*, one lesson from the forkiverse should be, this is still a great selling point for community organizers. And they can bring over their people.
Jens Ljungkvist
in reply to Roni Rolle Laukkarinen • • •This is why I’m on the Fediverse, bridging with BlueSky. Because I’d be happy to federate with them, if they’d open up as standard.
But they don’t. They want to keep to themselves unless someone explicitly says they want to bridge to Fediverse.
That’s the reason I don’t really trust BlueSky.
Did you see the European PDS, EuroSky?
Mathew Storm
in reply to Roni Rolle Laukkarinen • • •That's crazy. I wonder why they are trying so hard to look decentralized, when under the hood they really aren't.
If they truly cared about decentralization, they would have implemented the already existing ActivityPub it became a W3C recommended standard in 2018...
Something fishy about bluesky. Thanks for sharing, I didn't know about this!
Roni Rolle Laukkarinen
in reply to Mathew Storm • • •Their problem is they wanted their own from the begin with, to control. They claim that Fediverse and ActivityPub community have been "suspicious" towards them, but also "it’d have been a difficult collaboration if we chose to use AP, especially since we weren’t willing to compromise on some of the decisions". I see it they never even wanted to try.
github.com/bluesky-social/atpr…
Already a decentralized federated protocol
dmbr0 (GitHub)Roni Rolle Laukkarinen
Unknown parent • • •@zotheca It's not just populism when it comes to self-hosting and independence. The amount of data in the Fediverse is huge, yet you can still host everything from a USB stick if you want to (need S3 or NAS for storage, but anyway, it's simple).
I see Bluesky as false marketing in many ways. Decentralization, by definition, should mean as much as possible. We all know what happens when Cloudflare or AWS goes down - that's not decentralization if only a handful of large services exist. So I completely disagree with the idea that "a few is enough".
Grow Your Own Services 🌱
Unknown parent • • •@zotheca
Bluesky was able to ban Blacksky's users, it seems there's still a centralised kill switch:
plus.flux.community/p/banning-…
Banning controversy reveals Bluesky’s federation isn’t there yet
Matthew Sheffield (Flux)hallunke23 🇺🇦
in reply to Roni Rolle Laukkarinen • • •Well, I recently discovered that Bluesky got one step closer to decentralization:
It is now possible to set up DIDs without depending on Bluesky's services. If you look into the AT spec, you will find that there are now two types of DIDs that can be used for Bluesky: did:plc (which can only be issued by Bluesky) and did:web which essentially consist of a domain name. So an AT user of johndoe.example.com could have a DID of did:web:johndoe.example.com.
But now there are at
(1/3) @rolle #Bluesky
Tommi 🤯
in reply to Roni Rolle Laukkarinen • • •LarsNygard
in reply to Roni Rolle Laukkarinen • • •The problem with self hosting and mastodon is that only a handful of tech people actually care to host their own. Hosting an instance starts to cost serious money if you have a lot of users.
I think the best solution would be a torrent based solution that can run entirely in a browser. I've started working on such a client, but development is stale right now for resources, time and knowledge.
I've successfully synced profiles from LAN to a mobile on cellular network, so the concept should work.
If anyone wants to take a look, fork or join, let me know:
github.com/larsnygard/SnartNet
GitHub - larsnygard/SnartNet: Verified, signed, and decentralized social media and messaging.
GitHubRoni Rolle Laukkarinen
in reply to LarsNygard • • •LarsNygard
in reply to Roni Rolle Laukkarinen • • •Not everyone can host their own. Most of my friends and family can't. If you host an instance and get two thousand users, it won't be free to host. Ten thousands instances is a handful in this matter. And if you host your own instance and have a million followers?
Torrents can scale for all of this. It will also be impossible to block. No central servers to attack. No central storage of data.
Roni Rolle Laukkarinen
in reply to LarsNygard • • •