Gregory's ServerTo summarize: Bluesky makes accounts portable by taking everything important about them off of the servers that handle posting. Identity goes to a registry. Post history goes into an ever-growing backup on your own device. And most other functions are provided by services that crawl and index the entire network. To take full advantage of account portability, then, you'll have to shoulder some of the technical burden yourself, and make a few privacy tradeoffs.
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All of this speaks to the issue of decentralization, btw. Ostensibly, Bluesky is built for federation between multiple PDS, the protocol's version of instances. AFAICT, though, PDS only communicate with one another when you @ a specific user on another server. Most of the time, they're just middlemen between your client and the indexing servers. The indexing servers are making most of the real decisions about what shows up in your timeline. Bluesky is centralized around indexers. In theory, there can be multiple indexers, and you (or, at least, your PDS) would be able to choose between them. In practice, though, it's going to be incredibly costly to run an indexer, so expect corporations and VC-backed orgs to dominate. Bluesky has the first-to-market advantage, so they'll be the big one. Twitter could well pivot to indexing on the BS protocol. Maybe a few others will pop up. That's what decentralization really means here: Your choice of corporate-run indexers.  |
The technical burdens include (but may not be limited to): making sure your DID is registered with a secure and sustainable registry that's not operated by your PDS; managing backups of your entire account history on your own devices; and keeping track of the registry key you need in order to restore an account in an emergency.
The privacy tradeoff is that everything you do on the service will be indexed by third parties for use in their algorithms and (presumably) for their profit.