this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2025
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Not yet. Their AT protocol, similar to the Fediverse's ActivityPub protocol, is open source and is supposedly working towards the goal of enabling federation, but presently Bluesky is centrally-hosted and run. In theory, one could use the existing AT protocol and spin up their own Bluesky alternative, but it would just make another "center" given that current lack of federation.
The optimist in me is hoping that this is just a temporary thing, to show users that the platform works before enabling federation, versus what has happened to the Fediverse early on where a lot of poorly-implemented/poorly-run instances that couldn't handle any significant user load ended up buckling and gave early adopters a negative impression.
But the cynic in me (and the commonly-accepted conclusion others appear to have drawn) considers the possibility that Bluesky no longer cares about decentralization and would prefer to remain a centrally-hosted Twitter 2.0. But there is a push to transfer the governance of the AT protocol to a nonprofit to ensure that its original purpose is protected, so hopefully that or some other initiative like it ends up accomplishing their mission.
Christine Lemmer-Webber (the lead author of the ActivityPub standard) published an article explaining why bluesky is not truly decentralised and how it is different from activitypub.