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> Bluesky lacks the one federated feature that is absolutely necessary for me to trust it: the ability to leave Bluesky and go to another host and continue to talk to the people I’ve entered into community with there. While there are many independently maintained servers that provide services to Bluesky and its users, there is only one Bluesky server.

I'm not sure this is up to date, but Bluesky/AT Proto's architecture is pretty complex to wrap my head around so maybe I just misunderstand. The biggest difference is that unlike Mastodon, Bluesky doesn't really have a single concept of an 'instance' that represents an independent segment of the network like Mastodon does. Instead you have PDSs (which is a user and their data), relays (which centrally relay multiple PDSs like a firehose), and the app view (the frontend for visualising the relay and interacting with PDSs).

You can host your own PDS so you are in control of your own data and identity, and you can migrate away from Bluesky-operated PDS to your own, though at the moment you can't migrate back https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds/blob/main/ACCOUNT_MIGR... https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3l5ii332pf32u

Bluesky's AT Proto design has different trade offs to Mastodon. Bluesky seems like the more feature complete, technically superior, twitter-scale design, being expectedly more complex. Mastodon/ActivityPub is easier to boot up something completely decentralised, but hosters often complain about scale. The real test comes down to the resiliancy of the service is the main provider shuts down. At the moment I think Bluesky would suffer a lot more than Mastodon if the company just went away.



Recommend this deep dive article to understand some of these issues: https://dustycloud.org/blog/re-re-bluesky-decentralization/




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