You can easily run a PDS, that's the main public-facing part, you'd need port forwarding and a domain name for this.Appviews are easier to host imo, https://github.com/alnkesq/AppViewLite is what I use. You can run this on a PC right now, and log in with your bluesky account.
Bluesky's network has 2 main layers, the PDS layer, and the appview layer.
Everyone's PDS stores their posts, likes and account, and handles authentication.It doesn't do anything else. an appview gathers posts from PDSes, and indexes and sorts them (for feeds and notifications).AppViews all share the same posts, so they're in the same network.
People with bsky.social accounts can evade the bans by using: deer.social, zeppelin.social and blacksky.community, without even having to migrate their accounts.
PDSes: These are "dumb" data stores. The do not do anything except store data and handle authentication. Your account "lives" on them, but you can migrate between them seamlessly, and keep your data when you migrate.
Relays: These connect to PDSes over websocket and store all the data from them. They provide a "firehose" of data through websockets. The advantage of relays is that there is far less missing information than on the fediverse.
AppViews: These connect to relays and take the posts. They sort through the data and only keep what is relevant for them.For example, bsky.app is an appview. It connects to the bolson.bsky.dev relay, and only takes objects that have an app.bsky.* nsid/type. frontpage.fyi is another one, it connects to the relay1.us-west.bsky.network relay, it ignores all posts that except for ones with fyi.frontpage.* nsids, and that are too long.
This approach is way better than activitypub.
Relays aren't necessary, nor expensive to run (anymore). For example, appviewlite can be run easily, and can be configured to crawl PDSes itself, rather than using a relay.
It has the potential to be federated in a meaningful way in the real world right now.I'm not going to deny that most people using bluesky's servers is a problem, because it is.
Jack Dorsey wasn't very involved in bluesky, and isn't involved at all anymore. He left the board and deleted his account after they did moderation.
Bluesky, right now, is federated in a meaningful way. Whether or not it's decentralised only depends on your definition of the word at this point.
Also: the people who work at bluesky, right now, have very good intentions. I don't really think any are crypto-bros. The main problem is investors trying to claw back some value after they invested in it.
Honourable mention to AppViewLite which lets you easily and cheaply host an appview yourself. I can run it on my laptop easily. It doesn't depend on relays, it can crawls PDSes directly.
Lea.pet also got a c&d for @apple@lea.pet