Yeah man idk, I run my own PDS on hardware I own and feel zero percent less dependent on Bluesky PBC I've used all the alternate frontends, appviews, relays, etc. Blacksky is by far the best, but only because they have enough money and talent to run the heavy metal, which is great
Mar 10, 2026 at 7:08 PM
PDS Entryway | Bluesky
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 does. These PDSs have hostnames such as morel.us-east.host.bsky.network.
Running Bluesky PDS undockered
A bit over a year ago, in the first week of January 2025, I migrated my main Bluesky account to my own PDS on a Netcup VPS. It’s been quite easy to set up using the official installer, and it’s been running pretty much without any problems or maintenance the whole year.
Bluesky PDS
Take control of your online identity with a one-click Bluesky PDS. Built on the open AT Protocol, Bluesky gives users full ownership of their social data and digital presence. Clovyr makes self-hosting simple, secure, and accessible for everyone, with no command line required.
Self-hosting - AT Protocol
Self-hosting a Bluesky PDS means running your own Personal Data Server that is capable of federating with the wider ATProto network.
Blacksky was one of the 1st PDSs to allow open sign ups We are also now the largest PDS deployment that doesn't run any of bsky's code Sorry for the turbulence. It was the one-time price to pay for being able to build features like private accounts or sign-in via phone number w/o waiting on Bluesky
The sooner the Atmosphere becomes less Bluesky-centric, the better for everyone, include Bluesky PBC. It's fantastic to have bsky as a launching pad, but the Atmosphere's potential is so so much bigger. Let this year be the year we have big succesful apps where the bsky association is incidental.
An unordered / non-exhaustive list of things that helped scale Bluesky's infra efficiently: + Exiting the cloud (colocation) + HAProxy w/many Node backends + Go w/clever code + ScyllaDB + SQLite w/per user databases + Redis w/many instances + AMD servers w/many cores + Purchasing bandwidth directly
Is there a good write up anywhere on the sort of app design of Bluesky, with the frontend client and the PDS proxying requests. I'm curious about whether other approaches were considered, why this approach was chosen, how a relatively snappy experience was accomplished, anything related to that!
Finally time to drop the thing I've been working on for weeks: Bluesky without Bluesky – I ran a full stack PDS/Relay/AppServer/Client stack using no bluesky code!
Bluesky... without Bluesky
mia.leaflet.pubFinally time to drop the thing I've been working on for weeks: Bluesky without Bluesky – I ran a full stack PDS/Relay/AppServer/Client stack using no bluesky code!
Bluesky... without Bluesky
mia.leaflet.pub
