Following up from our recent "Fediverse" experiment with GoToSocial, we're introducing another $1/month experimental product - a Bluesky Personal Data Server (PDS).
Bluesky is an ambitious federated social network initially spun off from pre-X Twitter, but is now an independent public benefit corporation as of 2022 (Wikipedia).
See an example post here: (look familiar?)
So, like another Twitter?
Very much so, think "Twitter Classic", from 2021, but with some key philosophical and architectural differences...
The network is "federated" with the ATProtocol, which allows all participating users to communicate through a series of relays, whether their account is "on" the primary bsky.social server, or on their own, independently-managed data server instance.
A Personal Data Server (PDS) is a small server which is the "home" for one or more accounts, and serves to manage all their data storage, "distributing" the data separately from the other components of the network (*relaying, scraping, etc*), and giving users control of the presentation and storage of their data.
But who will I follow?
This is the major downside to Mastodon's ActivityPub federation - You have to manually build up your social graph, by hand, one follow-at-a-time, and searching is basically non-existent.
Bluesky, on the other hand, approaches the problem differently - all user content is available and indexed for searching across the entire network, so you can rapidly discover interesting content, even add "starter packs" of people to follow, in a single click. The onboarding process will get you started with a basic "let us know your interests" question, but (and this is a key differentiator to Twitter/X..) you can then opt into algorithmic / manually-curated "feeds" of various interests, like "movie trailers", "Sexy New Zealanders", or thousands of other subsets of users.
Why bother with PDS if Bluesky is free?
Good question. Let's be clear - Bluesky is increasingly mainstream (they were growing 1M users/day in early Jan!), but a PDS is for technical tinkerers, not mainstreamers.
However.. if you have strong opinions about social networking, data ownership / sovereignty, or you just like to geek out with how federated social networks work, then a PDS is a fun way go "below the surface", and maintain control / ownership of your data.
Is it hard to setup?
It's harder than your average stack, due to the nature of the Bluesky network, and how rapidly it's evolving (partly, this is why you'd use ElfHosted, rather than self-hosting your PDS - there's less upkeep for you). However, we have detailed instructions at https://docs.elfhosted.com/app/bluesky-pds/, and we'll help out (we're learning too!) if we can.