Today, I was curious about just exactly how hard it would be to setup my own Bluesky PDS via a Digital Ocean VPS. I already had a domain that I grabbed a while back (mkultra.social), because it was available, and also cheap, and I didn't know what I wanted to do with it. Having been banned/suspended via the official Bluesky moderation multiple times for invalid/ridiculous reasons, the answer was clear: Host a PDS, and move. Become ungovernable.
You can see my successfully migrated main Bluesky account, which now resides at mkultra.social, here.
It may appear to be part of bsky.social, but it's not. This is just the appview we're using to connect to my PDS, so that I can view a feed, and post. Theoretically, if another appview exists, I could log into my account through that, as well, no issues.
Despite all the wrong the main Bluesky devs/owners have done and seem to be doing, this, uhm ... is definitely "account portability*.
In other words, in a sense of the word, this is decentralization.
I'm running this PDS on a 6 dollar Digital Ocean VPS, and the only data it's responsible for is my own. Which is a mere 600 megs. That's about a year or more worth of posts that were ingested.
A question you might want to ask, is, "Don't the millions of feeds and media threaten to gunk up your PDS and skyrocket the costs?"
Nope.
The official relay is responsible for that, so there is zero extra cost to me.
I actually kind of wish Mastodon hosting worked this way. Instead of being responsible for the media attachments and posts for every single Fediverse user you come into contact with, including whomever you see, you should be responsible for your own data, and your own data alone.
But, I'm not sure Mastodon is at a point where they could radically redesign how this all works.
Other pieces of Fedi software use caching and reverse proxies for media, which helps lower costs.
Six bucks, though, is a pretty low price-point, especially if it never changes.
Now, the only issue I rant into, was, is that I created an initial account for myself upon launching the PDS, which resulted in an "invalid handle" error on the BSKY appview. I thought this would resolve itself once the DNS had finished propagation, but it didn't.
It actually took clearing cache and restarting everything over and over until it suddenly worked, and I don't even understand or know if that's even what fixed it!
I do have a handle now, though.
I could also, technically, accept other users to my PDS, but as it is and operates right now, I would have to induct them via the terminal, and they would have to expose their password (whatever they want it to be) to me. But, maybe once my head doesn't feel like it's being crushed by a vice, I'll see if I can make a simple web interface for migrating an account (although I would probably limit this, because my VPS only has 32 gigs, and I don't feel like spinning up more disk space).
Will I use this, seriously, and for real?
I don't know. I'm still pretty partial to the Fediverse, mainly because it isn't and has never been VC funded, none of the serious instances have ever approached large, official media outlets and welcomed fascists directly to the platform, and those aforementioned numerous instances have never banned or threatened anyone for saying, "I wish ill on J.K. Rowling," despite the issues the Fediverse does have.
Some reading this may disagree with what a fascist is, or are, and whether this is impactful, or bad for a social media platform to do, and to you I would say: You are incorrect, go back to Twitter, or, apparently, the official Bluesky PDS (is PDS the right word for official instance? I don't know.)
Suffice to say, all those times I thought Bluesky wasn't decentralized, I was actually kinda wrong.
I'm on my own server, and it costs me basically nothing. And, technically, if you have the willpower to endure Oracle's mess of a system, you could probably do this for free. The main instance that Bluesky runs is, admittedly really large, and could be used to argue that it's actually centralized, but ... if you think about it, mastodon.social is also huge. It's massive compared to a lot of other Fedi instances. Would you use that fact to argue that the Fediverse is also "centralized?"
I think the future, although dark, could also be interesting, depending on how this all evolves.
On a final note, I'd also like to mention that this process was mostly extremely painless. Launching a PDS took like, ... 2 minutes. In comparison, if it's your first time launching, say, a Mastodon instance, you could be in for *hours* of troubleshooting. If you're experienced, it still takes up to at least a half an hour, depending on what it is you're doing. Especially if you need to install and activate ElasticSearch (I hate you, ElasticSearch).
These are some things, I think, that should be taken into consideration ... at some point, in the Fediverse/Mastodon development cycles.
Source: https://mkultra.monster/social-media/20 ... ng-to-pds/
