Social network Bluesky, a competitor to the likes of X, Threads, and Mastodon, opened its doors with today's news that the network is opening up federation, following a public launch earlier this month. The move will allow anyone to run their own server that connects to Bluesky's network, hosting their own data, their own accounts, and creating their own rules. This distributed model of social networking is similar to the one already used by Mastodon, but in Bluesky it is underpinned by a different protocol, and for now he has kept the two networks separate.
The growing interest in federation is driven by consumer demand for more control over their personal data. This has become even more prominent since billionaire Elon Musk bought his Twitter, rebranded it to X, and changed its focus to “all apps” focused on We collected. Payments, creators, video programming, AI…and even looser moderation. That has led some former Twitter users to look for more sustainable alternatives like Mastodon and Bluesky.
Bluesky in particular attracted attention because it started life as a Twitter-funded project under Jack Dorsey. It then spun out as its own company and raised money like a typical startup.
The company opened to the public earlier this month after a rather long period in private beta and currently has more than 5 million registered users, according to official trackers. Federation allows those interested in self-hosting to set up their own servers or instances to serve the needs of themselves or a specific community, so the network can continue to grow. Instances can send and receive posts from other instances, such as instances operated by Bluesky itself, but can also block other instances and set their own moderation guidelines if they wish. .
This may be helpful for those who wanted to make Bluesky a safer place to interact, unlike Twitter/X, but are frustrated by Bluesky's sometimes controversial moderation decisions. yeah.
This model is similar to Mastodon, but Bluesky uses a new social networking protocol, the AT protocol, whereas Mastodon and many other networks currently use ActivityPub. The latter is a W3C-approved standard, so it's the standard Instagram has adopted for its X rival Threads.
As the company points out in today's announcement, there are some differences between Bluesky and Mastodon.
Bluesky users are in control of how their experience differs from others thanks to other features like custom feeds and composable moderation, allowing conversations directed by the communities they're a part of. rather than being able to participate in global conversations. . The latter means that moderation is not tied to the server. Server operators can set rules about the content they host, but communities can introduce additional layers of moderation using blocklists and, soon, independent moderation services. This means that there is less pressure to block (federate) other servers because of the content they host, as users have their own tools to manage moderation settings.
Additionally, Bluesky aims to make account portability easier than Mastodon, allowing users to change usernames or change servers without losing followers or posts.
Anyone interested in hosting their own service will need some technical know-how. Start by checking out the resources on Bluesky's developer blog, his PDS repository on Github, and the PDS Administrators Discord. Initially, federation will be open to users interested in running small servers.
“Several guardrails are in place to ensure the network runs smoothly for everyone in the ecosystem,” Bluesky's blog post states. “After this initial phase, we will open up federation to people who want to run large servers with many users,” the company said.
Once an alternative is established, Bluesky recommends that service as the default to new users, but users can change to another service at any time without losing data.