Trying to figure this out as in the recent threads a few people said that
Bluesky was federated, but it didn’t seem to actually be the case.
https://bsky.social/about/blog/02-22-2024-open-social-web
[https://bsky.social/about/blog/02-22-2024-open-social-web] in February
announced that Bluesky would allow federated servers The Bluesky documentation
on the topic isn’t very clear. They mention Bluesky.social a lot, as if it’s
supposed to be the one central server other PDS need to federate with: > 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 would. These PDSs have hostnames such as
morel.us-east.host.bsky.network. > However, the user-facing concept for
Bluesky’s “PDS Service” is simply bsky.social. This is reflected in the provided
subdomain that users on a Bluesky PDS have access to (i.e. their default handle
suffix), as well as the hostname that they may provide at login in order to
route their login request to the correct service. A user should not be expected
to understand or remember the specific host that their account is on. > To
enable this, we introduced a PDS Entryway service. This service is used to
orchestrate account management across Bluesky PDSs and to provide an interface
for interacting with bsky.social accounts.
https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/entryway#account-management
[https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/entryway#account-management] >
Self-hosting a Bluesky PDS means running your own Personal Data Server that is
capable of federating with the wider Bluesky social network.
https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds?tab=readme-ov-file#what-is-the-current-status-of-federation
[https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds?tab=readme-ov-file#what-is-the-current-status-of-federation]
The custom domain name is still something else, and does not seem to require a
PDS: https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-28-2023-domain-handle-tutorial
[https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-28-2023-domain-handle-tutorial] So, to come
back to the title question, do people know of an example of PDS that can be used
to access Bluesky without being on the main server?