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?

  • BeAware :fediverse:@social.beaware.live
    4·
    3 months ago

    @tengkuizdihar well, it’s not difficult to federate, it’s difficult to seperate your identity from BlueSky itself, if you’re trying to create something on ATproto.

    I doubt you’ll see big news about a service using ATproto, the way Fedi platforms do, besides BlueSky because they really don’t want you to differentiate that way.🤦‍♂️

    @fediverse

    • XNX@slrpnk.netEnglish
      4·
      3 months ago

      Or maybe they do it because it would be very confusing for 99% of users to read “sign in with your atproto account” when no one knows what that is. Its a good thing theyre keeping things simple for now instead of getting the mastodon “its too complicated” issue and having non tech users not use it.

      Mastodon and the activitypub culture is very much either “its too complicated” or “how do you not understand its so simple maybe you’re just dumb and shouldnt be here” energy and its why 99% of topics here are just tech and politics. Almost no artists use it and the few that use it are on mastodon.art which defederates from so many instances.

      • /usr/libexec/ccoremapd@mstdn.social
        0·
        3 months ago

        @xnx @BeAware

        I believe they’re planning to change that into something like “Sign in with your ATmosphere account.” (hopefully)

        I could be wrong, but the term “ATmosphere” has been used widely by non-technical users.

          • Kuba Suder • @mackuba.eu on 🦋@martianbase.net
            1·
            3 months ago

            @xnx @ccoremapd @fediverse It was an unofficial term until recently, but they seem to be adopting it a bit more officially right now, see e.g. here https://atproto.com and in the “Glossary” section. But I think this will stay a developer-targeted term, I don’t think they’ll use it in such context as “Sign in with your ATmosphere account” (but they don’t really dictate to third parties right now how they should phrase this on their side).

        • XNX@slrpnk.netEnglish
          3·
          3 months ago

          It does matter their reasoning and they can change the word when atproto is more understood. No fedi software uses “sign in with your activitypub account” either because confusing users is a bad thing.

          I personally like that theyre doing things to appeal to non tech users because i dont want to use a service no one uses. Its why i dont use any activitypub service for my art because theres no artists using activitypub but bluesky has a huge art community even though they still dont have video