Today, we’re excited to announce that the Bluesky network is federating and opening up in a way that allows you to host your own data. What does this mean?

Your data, such as your posts, likes, and follows, needs to be stored somewhere. With traditional social media, your data is stored by the social media company whose services you've signed up for. If you ever want to stop using that company's services, you can do that—but you would have to leave that social network and lose your existing connections.

It doesn't have to be this way! An alternative model is how the internet itself works. Anyone can put up a website on the internet

We think social media should work the same way. When you register on Bluesky, by default we'll suggest that Bluesky will store your data. But if you'd like to let another company store it, or even store it yourself, you can do that. You'll also be able to change your mind at any point, moving your data to another provider without losing any of your existing posts, likes, or follows. From your followers' perspective, your profile is always available at your handle—no matter where your information is actually stored, or how many times it has been moved.

I don't spend a lot of time on Bluesky, but I love what they're doing.

They now:

• Made their service generally available.
• Have over 5 million users.
• Support RSS

Now you can self-host your data. I'm excited.

The other piece of this that's interesting is their feature which enables you to use your domain as a custom handle. Not only is your identity portable, but also your data. I'd be interested to see how this works in practice given you can already do some of this on the Fediverse on platforms like Mastodon. Again, that portable identity component to me is crucial. That's one of the challenges with Mastodon today. While you can move instances, your identity changes and while most of your data comes with you, there's tihngs that still dont transfer over. The other part that I'd be interested in seeing is whether or not they can be efficient in the storage of federated data. One of the challenges with Mastodon is, your server quickly fills up because of data from other instances (when you federate). It's gotten better, but this is an area I spend most of my time when maintaining my own self-hosted instance.

I'm excited to tinker and self-host my own data. Maybe I'll also syndicate to Bluesky just like I do with Mastodon today.

In the meantime, you can find me on Bluesky @lqdev.me.