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Long winded, nuanced answer, ready your eyeballs:

It's a bit complicated, but since we're on Fediverse and at least somewhat familiar with how things work here, I'll try to explain with that comparison in mind.

On Fediverse, instances are in control of the user data directly. To "migrate" your account, you'd be switching instances and admins entirely.

BlueSky splits things up quite a bit more.

There, you can host your own "PDS" or Personal Data Server. That hosts your account and post info only.

Then, there's the "AppView". In comparison to Fediverse, these are like Lemmy, Mastodon, Mbin, etc. Right now, there's VERY few Appviews to choose from.

Then, there's the "relay". Which to Fediverse, the only thing similar is also relays, but they work differently. On BlueSky, they relay every post and interactions of all the PDS data that connect to AppViews. I do not think there's a choice on *what* is relayed, just a huge firehose. That being said, they're not optional like Fediverse. To complete the network, relays are required on ATProto and apparently could be expensive to host, so right now, it appears the only relay is hosted by BlueSky the company. Which makes things slightly centralized.

Now, that we have those definitions out of the way, this is where things get a bit muddy and a bit of purposeful corporate created confusion for purpose of selfishness is quite apparent.

Right now, there's very few AppViews. The ones I'm aware of are, BlueSky itself, Whitewind, and Frontpage.xyz.

The confusion happens because BlueSky, the company, doesn't separate the fact that accounts hosted on self-hosted PDS, aren't technically Bluesky accounts, they're ATproto accounts. Everywhere you look to login, it says "login using your BlueSky account". I can only assume they're doing this on purpose so that anyone who tries to make an Appview, host a PDS, AND a relay, can't have their own "identity" like different instances and platforms have here on Fedi.

That will confuse people and make them think *everything* is just hosted by BlueSky the company. However, as we've now established, there's definitely a separation of "Bluesky" the company, "BlueSky" the AppView that you can login to using your "BlueSky" account, which doesnt technically have to be hosted by anything related to BlueSky.

I hope this all makes sense and you can tell that *technically* things are decentralized for the most part. It's just that BlueSky is purposefully muddying their own definitions of things so that anyone that tries to build on ATproto, has a hard time making themselves known as *not* bluesky due to the way they conflate all these definitions.

Sorry for the huge post and hope it makes sense in some way.

Thanks for reading.😁👍

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