Bluesky's website is similar to a search engine, where it just trawls everyone announcing to the world their AT stuff. It's a major goal for them to not even be able to control the aggregator.

They talk a little about it here: https://bsky.social/about/blog/11-15-2023-toward-federation

They really want to make something that's more intuitive than ActivityPub for the average joe while still maintaining the billionaire-proofing that federation gives. The tech is built from the ground up to keep them from being evil one day.

For example, this is my Bluesky account: https://atproto-browser.vercel.app/at/englishmobster.bsky.social

I can self-host that content on a domain I control, and as long as I tell the AT aggregators "Hey, look here" it can fetch it and serve all my stuff. My content is mine, I can host it, and nobody can take it from me.

It's different than self-hosting a Mastodon instance where you also get everyone else's stuff and have to deal with running a social network. It's much closer to running a personal website.

@ricmac I dunno, I'm not convinced.

Bluesky's main thing is that every account is technically very similar to an RSS feed. You have your own website that you can self-host.

The main Bluesky website is a feed aggregator, that displays them in a Twitter-like interface.

If Bluesky gets enshittified, then all we need is to swap to a different aggregator (like swapping Mastodon instances).

It's not the same scenario as Twitter formerly having an open API; the core tech is decentralized.