Bluesky has taken another big step in "federating and opening up" ways for users to own their data by allowing people to host their own servers.
The social media announced in a blog post that it is opening up "federation for data hosting," letting users secure personal data, moderation preferences, and timeline feeds outside of Bluesky's storage.
This means that even if Bluesky went down, users can still access their data on the app via selected third-party networks and cloud services.
Bluesky assured that it would implement "some guardrails" to keep users from abusing the feature and preventing similar outages when it first fully opened to the public two weeks ago.
As of writing, the app only allows users to self-host on their personal accounts but promised to increase self-hosted servers to 10 accounts each.
Bluesky hinted that server limits will become more relaxed as "trust and reputation are established" among the first trial testers.
Bluesky to Introduce Independent Server Moderation
Aside from securing personal data on self-hosting networks, Bluesky is also introducing other features to allow users to have more control over their servers.
According to The Verge, independent moderation on individual networks is expected to roll out soon as Bluesky opens more features for third-party developers and users have more control over their feed.
Bluesky has not confirmed if the server moderation will be similar to moderator status on Discord channels and subreddits.
It is worth noting, however, that these features will require more technical knowledge, including know-how on GitHub, to start and operate federation networks.
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Bluesky Vs Mastodon: Difference in Content Control
Bluesky is often compared to Mastodon, another federation social media platform, so it also took time to clarify some differences between the two.
The social media cited its policies around content moderation and feeds as the primary gap between the two sites.
Mastodon networks are part of the user's profile, meaning the server host controls what content members see.
Bluesky, on the other hand, lets the user's timeline preferences, their likes, accounts followed, and topics engaged the most, mold the feed seen on the federation servers.
