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?

  • haui@lemmy.giftedmc.comEnglish
    0·
    11 days ago

    So, from up close it seems like people can have their own servers (i checked wurzelmann.at which is currently on the frontpage) but they do not seem to have their own frontend.

    This indeed makes it so that for people to actually SEE your content you must federate with one entity and are controlled by them.

    Imo this is very bad because it takes the freedom out of federation. Yes, you dont need to login to an app but if they ban you or defederate or delete your post, nobody will see it, right?

    Please someone who has tried and gets the technical details shed light on this.