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@adiz I think my got my answers here:

https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

If I'm reading this correctly, Bluesky offers the possibility for users to host Personal Data Servers, but this really just offloads storage onto the end users. Message delivery is handled by dumping all messages onto relays, which are sifted through by applications called "AppViews" who pick out and forward them to users.

There is currently only one relay run by Bluesky Inc, and since it's expected to store literally everything for everyone, you'd need 5 terabytes of storage (and growing) to create one. I don't know what's involved with running an AppView instance, but I imagine it's not simple and right now apparently there's only one and it's also run by Bluesky Inc

So the devil in the details appears to be "sure you can host your own data on your own PDS, but whether anybody gets to see anything you post (or vice versa) depends on a service that's too big for anybody but a corpo to run, and we run the only one everybody uses". The relay/AppView layer appears to be where algorithmic stuff for user feeds is done as well, so there's your chokepoint for deciding who gets to see what (or doesn't).