Self hosted relays do exist, they’re just not open to the public (mostly used for archival / development currently)

Blorgbob exists, and people use their own blorgbobs, but also people are not allowed to use blorgbobs, and they are only in archives or experimental development.

… Please tell me you understand you have just said completely self contradictory nonsense.

Leaving the actual truth or falsity of your claim aside… what you have just stated is a logically impossible paradox.

Backfill means that the AppView has to request and download and then be able to present… the entire history of all posts from everyone on BlueSky.

If you are familiar with crypto, its like how you have to download either the entire blockchain, or nowadays, a trimmed down/compressed version of it… before you can interact with it.

If you are familiar with any kind of database like a forum or something… when migrating, you have to actually import a copy of all the preexisting users, posts, forum structure, posts, etc… if you want the new forum to actually contain what the old forum did, before you allow people to start making new posts.

When this rando is setting up his own AppView… he is asking the BlueSky Relays to give his AppView all the older posts, before the AppView is caught up, and can then begin to function in realtime with the rest of the network.

I don’t mean to be rude, but if you genuienly don’t know what ‘backfill’ means in this context, it is very likely you have essentially zero experience with or knowledge of systems that involve large databases … it is a very common and well known term to anyone with basically over a year of doing most kinds of db admin/server admin work.

… I get the jokes, but I really, truly was just trying to use a real world example case to illustrate a functional aspect of the system, and not just … you know, bring up all the drama.

… Yeah, as 73ms already pointed out… that first link is just someone setting up an AppView.

To truly run an independent BlueSky system… you would have to run your own PDS, your own Relay, and your own AppView.

Your second link does actually have code and a rough setup guide to running your own Relay, so I will give you thanks and credit for showing that at least it is possible to theoretically do this…

But you say ‘several people run their own Relays’ and then do not evidence that.

The Relay config here is just… how to host your own Relay that would act as a member of BlueSky’s Relay network.

Basically, that is just how to transfer some of BlueSky’s server hosting costs … to yourself.

If you set up a totally independent Relay… could it even interface with BlueSky’s Relays?

As far as I can tell: No.

It would be totally independent… a parellel network, not a federated one that interfaces with the rest of BlueSky, and is thus not actually able to ‘federate’.

What… you would have to do… is set up your own Relay, connect it to basically all the other preexisting PDSs you want to include, then also run your own PDS, then also run your own AppView, and connect it to your own Relay… or just trust someother person running their own AppView, or just trust the official ones.

(But… I think that to connect your own Relay to preexisting PDSs… that would require those PDSs to… disconnect from the mainline BlueSky Relay system… because they can only point to one Relay system at a time… so that’s kind of a problem.)

That would be the only way to make your own … sort of branch of the BlueSky system, that at least in theory might be resistant to centralized censorship from BlueSky.

And again… I am not aware of anyone who has yet done this, or if it would even work at a technical level.

When dealing with software and tech companies, a good rule of thumb is that a planned or possible feature… doesn’t actually exist untill its been provably demonstrated to exist and work.

Yes, you can host your own PDS server, that is known and stated.

The entire design of a lemmy instance is meant to be more ‘self contained’, as I already mentioned. This is what enables the federation network to organize in a ‘many to many’ connection style, as opposed to a ‘many to one’.

A lemmy instance roughly has many/most of the capabilities of a PDS, Relay, and AppView… all rolled into one.

This is a fundamental difference of a ‘true’ federation model… all the members of the federation are capable of operating independently.

If you are in a federation of unequals, with built in dependencies… your ‘federation’ is much more like a king with vassal states, not a voluntary association.

Yes, migration of a user account from one instance to another would be complicated… but … so would migrating a user from one PDS to another.

I don’t even know how you could fully ‘migrate away from BlueSky servers’… when BlueSky run the only Relays.

Also, many (most?) actual client apps for viewing lemmy, posting on it, etc… they pretty much hold a lot of your particular user customizations, at least as it comes to visual theming, independently, locally, not even related to the actual user account on an instance you are using.

They also support easy switching between different lemmy user/instance accounts…

…

Also also, as far as I am aware… if you have an account on a lemmy instance, you can delete your account and this will wipe out all of that account’s posts and comments across the whole fediverse, aside from modlogs and internet archive web snapshotting type stuff.

I … think you can also export your own data as well?

Not 100% sure on these last two parts, maybe an instance admin or powermod could chime in… but I think this is correct?

Really?

Like, this is genuine news to me, if its true.

https://github.com/itaru2622/bluesky-selfhost-env

I can find tools like this, that help you set up a good number of elements of BlueSky… but the only mention of the relay (apparently also known as BGS, for… BigSky?)… is that you connect to it… not run your own.

Beyond even the price point and required server hosting heft… where, where is an actual ‘here is how to download, configure and run your own BlueSky relay’?

As far as I am aware, all there has been is a mix of vague, noncommital, and hopeful musings of various people suggesting that one day maybe it will be possible to do this, hopefully they’ll support that soon…

… which to me at least, very much reminds me of fanboys/girls of a video game just coping with the fact that their favorite video game with a massive bug or lacking a major advertised feature… will just have it fixed one day… even though the devs have been radio silent about it for a year.

i was asking in good faith, and i can’t thank you enough for providing such a thorough and effective answer.

I just wanted to clarify, as… at least for myself, even here on lemmy, discussions about this have been going on for at least 6 to 9 months, and … a good number of people have not been engaging in those discussions in good faith.

But yes, I am happy to answer, glad you found it helpful!

Apologies for the hilariously simplistic graphics… i literally just drew them on my gas station tier phone haha. But I think they get the point across.

it almost sounds like bluesky is just a baby twitter in the making, and it’ll probably end up the same way. i’m really digging the actual fediverse thing, mainly because it seems to be one of the only places that money and vc bs hasn’t been able to touch.

Yep, it pretty much literally is twitter 2.0 (3.0?), was founded by Jack Dorsey, … its not even a non profit, it is a for profit ‘benefit’ corporation, which basically just means its corporate bylaws claim that it attempts to benefit the public in some way.

IE, literally the corporate / legal version of virtue signalling… it is still ultimately a for profit corporation that will put profit and growth above everything else… and hopefully by now, people understand how that literally always turns out.

Like a toilet bowl, mounted to the ceiling.

As I see it the only advantage is that it is not run by Elon Musk.

And by ‘advantage’ I mean the ‘advantage’ of using a corporate product that, so far, is doing its best to drive people away from an actually censorship resistant Fediverse, using inclusive rainbow capitalist language to lure in the large majority of people who are not tech savvy enough to realize they are basically lying to / misleading them.

That is literally how I read it as well, BlueSky is farming out server load to enthusiastic and dedicated users, while also just going ham on the PR / propoganda / marketing making themselves appear to be something they are not.

Unless I missed something and BlueSky is actually letting people run and custom configure their own relays at least semi independently… yeah, they’re basically being quite shady and misleading.

I was oversimplifying a bit such that it wouldn’t be overwhelming to a self-described uninformed person asking for an explanation.

Yes, there are multiple actual relays but they functionally constitute a single layer or class of components in a birds eye view of the whole system.

As far as I am aware, no one other than BlueSky runs the relays, or has the code to do so.

If I am wrong about that, I would appreciate a source indicating such.

Does anyone other than BlueSky actually run a relay?

On the bright side, at least our upcoming American cyberpunk dystopia is now more likely to feature a greater prevelance of lone wolf, broke, two bit hackers as a semi-viable lifestyle/‘career path’…

My experience as a person who has a lot of experience working with computer is basically thus:

When you solve a problem for someone, you are a magician.

When you can’t, you are completely full of shit and know nothing about tech and your entire life is a lie.

When you tell someone ‘hey I wouldn’t do that’, your experience and expertise means nothing if what you are suggesting would mildly inconvenience them for 10 minutes, or takes more than 30 seconds to explain why it is a bad idea.

When you tell them ‘hey have you tried this?’ your experience and expertise also means nothing if you cannot do it for them and also make it so it never breaks again, and also they will keep doing the thing that makes it break even though you explained to them how to not do that thing that makes it break.

… I may as well just start an IT flavored Rodney Dangerfield comedy routine, it would be much more fun and less stressful than always being a db admin/data analyst/backend dev/frontend dev/whatever else my job title now apparently includes.

Assuming you are serious:

Bluesky is … arguably ‘federated’, but it is centralized, not decentralized.

https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20241128-bluesky-decentralization

Their model (AT Protocol) relies on a central, authoritative … ‘Relay’, that all ‘federated’ users and posts on federated PDS (personal data servers) must go through, to actually reach the ‘AppView’, ie, what all other people/users can actually see.

So, this is not a many to many, tangled spider web of connections, the way lemmy, and other parts of the actual fediverse are.

It is a top down hierarchy, a pyramid.

And Bluesky runs the Relay, the chokepoint.

If Bluesky cuts off the PDS your account is on, everyone on it is now gone.

The actual fediverse, Mastadon, Lemmy, etc, runs on ActivityPub.

In that model… every instance is essentially self contained, and every instance that is federated communicates with every other instance that is federated.

Each instance can decide what other instances they want to federate with… and users on each instance can personally block even more other users, communities, or entire instances if they choose to, but that only effects what that particular user sees.

That is what you call decentralized, approaching, or also having elements of being ‘distributed’.

To bring up an example without getting into the drama that led to it:

The ‘Tankie Triad’ of ml, lemmygrad and hexbear have had a number of other instances defederate from them.

But, there are also a good number of instances that have not done so.

So that means if your account is on hexbear… you can’t see or post on an instamce that has blocked your instance.

But, if you (a hexbear…ian?), post on a neutral instance… users on that neutral instance will see the post.

But but, if a user from an instance that has defederated from hexbear goes to to the neutral instance… they will not see the hexbearian’s post.

This sounds complicated, and it is, but … thats the whole point of a decentralized system. It is more complex in the abstract… but the entire system ends up being more robust, more adaptable, more customizable… without a central authority in direct control of the entire system.

Technically, its complicated, but basically, NHTSA both sets the standards by which a manufacturer should assess whether or not to do a recall… and they also issue recalls themselves.

They do investigations, compile data, and if it looks like a certain make and or model has a serious flaw, they’ll issue a recall if the manufacturer hasn’t.

If they are gutted, specifically as they have been by Musk, well then there are no more people actually investigating self driving capabilities and onboard computers, there are no more updates to any of those policies, and nobody issues a recall for such a category of defective vehicle.

Yep, my first thought on seeing this was … ‘and who will be enforcing this?’

No one, the answer is no one.

While the information about Elon’s history of making false claims, hardware and software details are accurate… there is no official body that has ruled as the title of the article suggests.

A more accurate headline would be ‘should’ not ‘has to’.

There is basically zero chance that this guy’s desire would be effectuated in the US … as the US agency that regulates cars… was recently gutted by Musk’s DOGE idiots.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2025/04/car-safety-experts-at-nhtsa-which-regulates-tesla-axed-by-doge/

Maybe the EU or China or other governments could… legally agree with the author, and order a similar command…

But uh yeah, the Trump admin is currently blatantly telling the Supreme Court to go fuck themselves, the law will soon be whatever the hell Trump and his orbiters want it to be, has already told the entire world to go fuck themselves and also beg and grovel at the same time.

Elon would just… continue doing whatever the fuck he wants, even if another country mandated a recall/replacement.

Sorry, but uh yeah, we have a fascist government now, the rule of law is dead, the law is now whatever the fuck the Trump admin says it is.

… Delete… all… IP law?

So… just literally make all piracy legal, switch all gaming and tv show and movie production/consumption… to an optional donation model?

Fuck it, why not.

I am both an avid pirate and have a degree in econ, wrote papers as an undergrad on how to potentially reform the DMCA… and uh yeah, at this point yeah no one has any fucking idea how any thing works, everyone is an idiot, sure fuck it, blow it all up, why not.

Don’t forget they also spun up their own ‘production studio’, and… it mostly produced basically the anime equivalent of lolcows in terms of their general reception and percieved quality, always overbudget and/or massively missing deadlines, never renewed for another season.

And then that was shut down within 3 years.

Oh right, and the union busting, also very cool.

I agree with all of that.

Maybe … 5 to 10% of Dems, like Federal Congresspeople, State governors… are willing to meaningfully go against pro corporate policies… at least more than half of the time.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some kind of psyop used to induce or intensify infighting among younger leftists, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if … there really wasn’t something specifically aimed at doing exactly that.

I know Russia has been very successfully employing the uh, hyperreality tactic, just fund or assist or influence enough people who are bombastic enough in any political persuasion, publish and spread baseless nonsense all across the spectrum to just sow general chaos…

But I do also think a lot of it really is people just adopting a vocabulary generally shared by leftists and then using it to their own, individual ends.

The thing with the CIA’s Simple Sabotage model is that it describes basically every social circle or work environment I’ve ever been in, or hear about from a friend.

General incompetence and … wasting time over petty stupid bullshit … just sounds like the norm in America generally, for pretty much my whole life… but maybe I have just had particularly bad luck with that.