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Today, we’re excited to announce that the Bluesky network is federating, or opening up in a way that allows you to host your own data. What does this mean?

Your data, such as your posts, likes, and follows, needs to be stored somewhere. With traditional social media, your data is stored by the social media company whose services you’ve signed up for. If you ever want to stop using that company’s services, you can do that—but you would have to leave that social network and lose your existing connections.

It doesn’t have to be this way! An alternative model is how the internet itself works. Anyone can put up a website on the internet. You can choose from one of many companies to host your site (or even host it yourself), and you can always change your mind about this later. If you move to another hosting provider, your visitors won’t even notice. No matter where your site’s data is managed and stored, your visitors can find your site simply by typing the name of the website or by clicking a link.

We think social media should work the same way. When you register on Bluesky, by default we’ll suggest that Bluesky will store your data. But if you’d like to let another company store it, or even store it yourself, you can do that. You’ll also be able to change your mind at any point, moving your data to another provider without losing any of your existing posts, likes, or follows. From your followers’ perspective, your profile is always available at your handle—no matter where your information is actually stored, or how many times it has been moved.

Federation lets services be interconnected, so there are a variety of apps and experiences that users can move between as fluidly as they do on the open web.The version of federation that we’re releasing today is intended for self-hosters. There are some guardrails in place to ensure we can keep the network running smoothly for everyone in the ecosystem. After this initial phase, we’ll open up federation to people looking to run larger servers with many users. For a more technical overview of what we’re releasing today and how to participate, check out the developer blog.

Some of our existing features already follow the federated philosophy, including usernames and feeds. Today, we’re opening up federation for data hosting. Below, we wanted to answer some common questions about what federated hosting is, what it means for your experience using Bluesky, and why we’re so excited about it.

That you can self-host your own Bluesky instance and communicate with other Bluesky instances. But as they explain, it works a bit different from ActivityPub instances.