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I've been reading up on , and it isn't what I thought. As far as I can tell (please correct me if you know otherwise), it an open source federated social media platform.

It runs on a protocol called , as opposed to ( and friends).

Other Fedi protocols include , DFRN (), Zot (), or Nomad ().

However, bridge services are needed for Bluesky/Mastodon federation, and there's mostly just one big Bluesky instance.

@dynamic yes correct. They are supposed to federate on their protocol but it is telling that there are no other instances I know of yet after all this time. I know that posting to them is a bit complex via the API so not sure if that counts at all.

Yet they draw crowds of new users.

@danie10

Drawing crowds of new users does not surprise me at all. I don't *understand* it, but it feels like it's literally always the way these things go : (

@danie10

Regarding multiple instances, @BeAware seems to indicate that there may actually *be* many instances, but we just can't tell because they are all under the same domain. Not sure how much of a problem that presents, but there's definitely a creepiness to it.

social.beaware.live/@BeAware/1

BeAwareBeAware :fediverse: (@BeAware@social.beaware.live)@Blaze@feddit.org Long winded, nuanced answer, ready your eyeballs: It's a bit complicated, but since we're on Fediverse and at least somewhat familiar with how things work here, I'll try to explain with that comparison in mind. On Fediverse, instances are in control of the user data directly. To "migrate" your account, you'd be switching instances and admins entirely. BlueSky splits things up quite a bit more. There, you can host your own "PDS" or Personal Data Server. That hosts your account and post info only. Then, there's the "AppView". In comparison to Fediverse, these are like Lemmy, Mastodon, Mbin, etc. Right now, there's VERY few Appviews to choose from. Then, there's the "relay". Which to Fediverse, the only thing similar is also relays, but they work differently. On BlueSky, they relay every post and interactions of all the PDS data that connect to AppViews. I do not think there's a choice on *what* is relayed, just a huge firehose. That being said, they're not optional like Fediverse. To complete the network, relays are required on ATProto and apparently could be expensive to host, so right now, it appears the only relay is hosted by BlueSky the company. Which makes things slightly centralized. Now, that we have those definitions out of the way, this is where things get a bit muddy and a bit of purposeful corporate created confusion for purpose of selfishness is quite apparent. Right now, there's very few AppViews. The ones I'm aware of are, BlueSky itself, Whitewind, and Frontpage.xyz. The confusion happens because BlueSky, the company, doesn't separate the fact that accounts hosted on self-hosted PDS, aren't technically Bluesky accounts, they're ATproto accounts. Everywhere you look to login, it says "login using your BlueSky account". I can only assume they're doing this on purpose so that anyone who tries to make an Appview, host a PDS, AND a relay, can't have their own "identity" like different instances and platforms have here on Fedi. That will confuse people and make them think *everything* is just hosted by BlueSky the company. However, as we've now established, there's definitely a separation of "Bluesky" the company, "BlueSky" the AppView that you can login to using your "BlueSky" account, which doesnt technically have to be hosted by anything related to BlueSky. I hope this all makes sense and you can tell that *technically* things are decentralized for the most part. It's just that BlueSky is purposefully muddying their own definitions of things so that anyone that tries to build on ATproto, has a hard time making themselves known as *not* bluesky due to the way they conflate all these definitions. Sorry for the huge post and hope it makes sense in some way. Thanks for reading.😁👍 @fediverse@lemmy.world

@dynamic @danie10 well...that's not entirely correct because they don't use the term instances and their infrastructure is quite different as you can read about in my post.🤷‍♂️

dynamic

@BeAware @danie10

Ah, perhaps I misunderstood. I had taken a "Personal Data Server" to be analogous to an instance. Given that I've gotten that wrong, I'm guessing that that's really just for one's own data?

Assuming I've gotten that right, does it contain the posts you read, or only the posts you make?

@dynamic @danie10 you have it right there, regarding *only* hosting the data, nothing more. I don't have those fine details regarding exactly which posts, but from my superficial understanding, I think it's only the posts you make, not the media associated with it nor anyone else's. Maybe you can allow other users as well on one single PDS. That I am also unsure of.

However, unlike instances here where we have complete websites hosted on the domain, a PDS domain lands on a small text file just explaining that a PDS is hosted there. No user interface. Those are seperated into the "AppView" part of the infrastructure.

@BeAware @dynamic @danie10 So, correction, *all* of your data has its "original location" at your PDS - all kinds of records (profile, posts, likes, follows, non-Bluesky records like WhiteWind blog posts), "blobs" like attached images, and even videos now. You can even put non-Bsky records like whtwnd posts on your Bluesky-hosted PDS.

They aren't usually directly served from there (data is served from the AppView, media from Bluesky CDN), but they can always be fetched from the original source.

@mackuba @dynamic @danie10 Thanks for the clarification.

I tried to look through the docs, but when I went to look for this specific answer, I didn't see it clearly.

I probably overlooked it.

@mackuba @dynamic @danie10 Also, several accounts can have their data on the PDS. I saw you say that in a different post, so I figured it'd be good to note here.

I think you said 10?

@BeAware @dynamic @danie10 Yeah, there's an artificial limit of 10 accounts right now enforced at the Relay so things don't get out of hand too quickly before shit's fully ready (it can be raised on request, but I think only Bridgy has did that so far).

Oh and one more thing, web UI isn't really integrated with the AppView, it's just a web-based JS client in the same way as Elk is for Mastodon. It's technically not any more privileged that any third party app, it's just "the official one".

@BeAware @dynamic @danie10 But you can log in from another web client like Skeetdeck to a Bluesky-hosted PDS, or from bsky.app to a self-hosted PDS

@mackuba @dynamic @danie10 Yeah, I explained it that way because I wanted to be as simple as possible.

I'm not sure your average user will understand those differences.

The point was to make clear the AppViews that already exist like Whitewind and Frontpage. I do have that correct, right? Those are AppViews with a web-based JS client attached?

@BeAware @dynamic @danie10 Something like that, I'm not completely sure what the architecture is for these two