Item — HN Reader

That’s like saying that someone using Google Reader doesn’t “experience federation of RSS”.

Yes, my experience using the Bluesky app includes the Bluesky app server aggregating from many independent PDS hosts (because people I follow like that). But it doesn’t show up in user experience because that’s the whole point.

And yes, I can use another aggregator instead of the Bluesky app, or even use a client which has no backend and relies on community-run Constellation index. It all roughly works the same.

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And it works as smoothly for people on other app servers?

What does “people on other app servers” mean? That’s not a thing.

App servers are aggregators. You can use any to read the network. Here’s a post I wrote, as seen via Bluesky aggregator:

https://bsky.app/profile/danabra.mov/post/3mol3gyikac2d

A second later, I could see the same post via the Blacksky community aggregator: https://blacksky.community/profile/did:plc:fpruhuo22xkm5o7tt...

Here’s the same post on pdsls which reads it directly from my hosting: https://pdsls.dev/at://did:plc:fpruhuo22xkm5o7ttr2ktxdo/app....

My hosting is managed by Bluesky but it has nothing to do with Bluesky app. Hosting is a separate decoupled thing. I could move hosting to my own Docker container, and all aggregators would see my posts just as fine.

Does this clear things up?

(Update: I actually have moved my hosting today but it seems like Blacksky is caching resolution too aggressively so it might not resolve it for a few more hours.)

Users of different appviews are just using a different aggregator/backend in effect. The network is still largely the same but there may be minor moderation or feature differences between appviews.

Users of different PDS would be the closest thing to a mastodon instance and there's thousands of different PDS without much issue. I'm on a "third party PDS" and I've had barely any issues.

I use a "third party" PDS, appview, PLC directory mirror, CDN, and client so 99.9% of my interaction with bluesky and atproto at large is independent of bluesky the corporation.

Despite using a third party "basically everything" my experience is essentially the same as a "default" bluesky user if not better in many ways