a practical guide to decentralization (for my friends)

Hi. This one's aimed at my personal friends on this wonderful protocol. If you are an atproto dev or enthusiast, no new information will be presented here. If you are indeed a personal friend: I love you.

I know I talk about the "AT Protocol" a lot. I am sorry. It is for a reason though! If you think I just like Bluesky that much—it isn't so! I have always been much more interested in the surrounding ecosystem—lovingly called the "Atmosphere", a term I want to establish early—and its decentralized nature.

I want to talk about decentralization and how it could matter to you, but let's not rehash "how atproto works", more talented people have written about this better than I could, here are some favorites of mine.0000

What you need to know: your account can be used for all kinds of services, can hold many forms of data and you can truly own it. What does decentralization look like, practically?

(Part 1 of 2) What else is there?

I think it's best not to think of your account as "a Bluesky account"—it's an Atmosphere account! ...that in your case just happens to be hosted on Bluesky. I am sure some of you maybe just wanted to chat under an @almostzoey.bsky.social stream and suddenly you ended up with an account on a microblogging site even though you have no interest in microblogging? Well, you're in luck! While Bluesky is the main attraction, there are many other worthwhile services in the Atmosphere that you now already have an account for, forget microblogging! If you like (macro-)blogging, well you are reading this on Leaflet , but also check out pckt.blog or Offprint ! If you like photography, I recommend Grain ! Short video? Spark ! Are you getting into programming? Check out Tangled ! Want to upload your music? plyr.fm ! Reviewing books? Bookhive ! New sites are being built every day, I could go on, but maybe look for your niche yourself!00

I truly get the reluctance to post somewhere new, but let me just list a few reasons why I think it can be worth it:

you're sticking it to X, Twitch, Substack, Instagram, GitHub et al.!

you really can own your data! if I decide I don't like Bookhive anymore, I can just use Popfeed instead and my data is already there0!

it is all one account! you are most likely already connected with your friends!

(Part 2 of 2) Where your account lives

My Atmosphere account lives here!

We have established you have an Atmosphere account that just happens to live on Bluesky servers. But what if you wanted your account, the source of all truth, to live elsewhere? First let's examine why you might want to do this:

if you are skeptical of Bluesky as a company—even when taking their word for it with their "a world without Caesars" mantra, the venture capital funded corporation probably won't usher in the revolution

you want your data to live outside of US borders and jurisdiction

you have qualms about Bluesky's stability—during the latest outage I was using my self-hosted account and Blacksky's API to mostly just shitpost normally

you want a hoster that reflects your interests or personal beliefs, e.g if you are a programmer but don't care about microblogging, perhaps you should be on tngl.sh , if you are queer and want to be on a server where you are not marginalized, join Northsky 's waitlist, or if you are super into K-pop, check out my mutual Kat's server of like-minded folks

you want to host your own data or trust a friend to host yours

simply for aura: why be a .bsky.social when you can be a .selfhosted.social , .witchcraft.systems or .67.gay (yes this is real)

If any of these speak to you—moving your account is actually quite easy, accounts are designed to be movable even if your current hoster becomes unresponsive or hostile! I have moved my accounts to my home-server using @baileytownsend.dev 's PDS Moover (bespoke movers like EU-Haul also exist). For a full list of Personal Data Servers out there, I recommend @mackuba.eu 's Bluesky handles directory —the ones with the ☀️ are servers that are free to join by anyone. Aside from the aforementioned, I want to highlight Eurosky and Blacksky as especially ambitious projects & good choices.

There are some concerns when moving to a new server: will your data be safe there? Is longevity of the server guaranteed? Most of these can be assuaged with technical answers like backing up your account data and creating new rotation keys for your account—I will offer to discuss these with me beforehand if you ever want to move yours!

Ultimately, whether it's for a second account of yours or if you want a friend to join the network, it might be worthwhile to point out these alternatives, keep their interests and beliefs in mind! Perhaps they will one day be on the Atmosphere without even realizing they also have a "Bluesky account"! 😌

Edit: While I was finalizing this post, this website sprung up: https://atmosphereaccount.com/