Solarbird :flag_cascadia:'s Post

@stux BlueSky is mildly complicated in that regard. Roughly speaking:

A PDS is just your Personal Data Server. Your own posts, your records of relationships. That's all it is; it relies on talking to another service called a _Relay_ to do more.

Relays are what handle the actual message distribution. Unlike Mastodon - where every instance is its own "relay" - without a Relay to talk to, your PDS can't send or receive messages.

There _can_ be more than one Relay in a BlueSky network. But they scale _down_ very poorly; to run a proper relay, you're literally talking tens of thousands of dollars a year in costs.

Their idea is that several Relay instances could be set up by organisations like CloudFlare. This has not yet happened, but could.