Relay (aggregates posts from all PDSs, responsible for federation of PDSs)
App views (generates feeds from the relay)
Bluesky hosts the only relay I’m aware of, because relays are very expensive to host. But afaict anyone can host a relay.
So if we’re to describe it:
PDSs are nations states
Relays are the federation of those nation states
App views are like the ambassadors of the federation.
Except that PDSs can be part of multiple federations, and app views can be ambassadors for multiple federations. Ok not a great analogy.
You can spin up your own Bluesky instance
…which is still managed by the Bluesky central server and can’t connect to peer instances without that server.
That’s not quite true afact.
There are 3 types of servers:
Bluesky hosts the only relay I’m aware of, because relays are very expensive to host. But afaict anyone can host a relay.
So if we’re to describe it:
PDSs are nations states
Relays are the federation of those nation states App views are like the ambassadors of the federation.
Except that PDSs can be part of multiple federations, and app views can be ambassadors for multiple federations. Ok not a great analogy.
Can two relays communicate with each other?
I don’t think so?
But a single PDSs can talk to multiple relays.
And I think an app view can talk to multiple relays (or at least switch between them)
So Bluesky doesn’t have any federated servers, and couldn’t federate with itself even if there were other servers.
It’s not fediverse.
Ah, okay, didn’t know that.