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.

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