People keep saying Bluesky is a centralized thing which doesn't federate.
But in fact you can run a personal-data-server.
I set one up to try and figure out how it works.
Not even hard to install really. Run the install script. It sets up 3 docker containers.
Then you have a API server that can talk to the bluesky network. It's doing so right away.
Which is a shame, I wanted to run it without connecting it to anything in test-mode or company-wide-mode first. Maybe there's ways to do that. Dunno.
Searching for the created user-handles in the web-app, even when logged in through my own server, does not show results.
Only way I could have my test accounts follow each other was to use the official web-app and paste in the profile URLs.
Since it's just an API server I can't really give out a profile URL, to have a page listing the account's posts.
I can see a way I could build one, but doesn't seem like anyone else has.
Just like a front-page to the hosted account? An actual public web-page that lists the user's μ-blog posts? Crazy talk!
The only web-apps are multi-column explorers.
Don't really understand to what extent the data on my bluesky personal-data-server is forwarded to the rest of the network. When "the rest of the network" is basically just one big blue-sky server, I guess just to one server is all there really is.
Would mine automatically see yours? Via bluesky's own server, or talking to each other independently?
I guess having a fedi instance like goto-social just seems more natural to me because to me the point of it all is to have a web-page that displays your posts.
Twitter used to do that, and goto-social or mastodon do that, but I'm an old fuddy-duddy web-head that doesn't understand the ways of the app that everyone likes these days.
So nobody cares if running a bluesky-server doesn't actually deliver web-pages that display your posts grandad! Everyone's using an app anyway.
One of my test-accounts is tentacles.at.dalliance.social
But if you visit that as a URL you just see a error page:
This is an AT Protocol Personal Data Server (PDS): https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto
Most API routes are under /xrpc/
Which just seems deliberately obtuse.
Guess I I can redirect those kinds of requests to a profile page in the bluesky app. Maybe even a copy of it running on my hardware. Or probably just some local script to fetch the API result and format it for web?
Here's what I'm thinking now: holding my account data on my own server which is still reliant upon the master indexes doesn't really have much advantage over using their public data-stores.
Not enough advantage to be worth a fiver a month for yet another virtual-machine at Hetzner, certainly.
Especially when the account would be, at best, a mirror of some of the posts already stored and backed up here on my Mastodon server on Fedi.
Why would I need to duplicate that data-store in a different format just to push the content into their central index?
Seems like I can skip the PDS step and just inject it directly to their public systems.
If I wasn't already in control of my public microblog data I guess there might be more point to it. But, I already got a self-owned store and that one has a nicer front end that actually shows web-pages.
So this one PDS server lasted less than 24 hours. Gonna delete it now.
I'm going to close the connection from this account to bsky through Bridgy, and instead switch to a shadow account over there mirroring the posts here.
If you're one of the very few reading this through the bidgy connection you should switch to following @dalliance.net over there - bsky.app/profile/dalliance.net
If you're reading this from the new mirror account, hello!
300 chars? Really?
Where is the app that allows 5000 characters? Or is this network not really decentralized?
Oh. It's owned by a company? That took blockchain capital?
Best just be a mirror of a the free network then.
A wormhole in time opened up and out fell this future timeline about bluesky:
2025 - Golden age, new 3rd party clients.
2026 - Adverts on the site
2027 - Bitcoin Integration
2028 - Charge other companies for API access to relays
2029 - 3rd parry clients access revoked
2030 - Sold to Amazon Consortium
2031 - Must now be logged in to view threads on the web app.
This is only one possible future. The real future could go faster or slower than that, or the whole internet could get shut down during WW3.