from Hacker News

How to self-host all of Bluesky except the AppView (for now)

by icy on 11/8/24, 1:13 PM with 79 comments

• by zzyzxd on 11/8/24, 7:08 PM

  Selfhosting is my hobby but I am also an SRE. I am hesitant to do this because the instruction is "too easy" -- "Simply open your firewall, download and run this installer.sh with sudo on your server and that's it!"[1].

  How do I secure the webserver and the data? Where is the data on my disk? How to backup and restore? High availability?

  There might be detailed documentation somewhere, or I can even read the code. But these are the important things an open source software should tell its users right off the bat.

  1: https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds/blob/main/README.md

• by sureglymop on 11/8/24, 5:56 PM

  It's great that you wrote this up!

  One thing I have found with many open source/selfhostable projects is just how much running them yourself can vary. It can go from a simple compose file with everything included to having to dig for obscure services and piece together how they all form the whole.

  For example, I recently looked into self hosting Zotero. It is so under documented and complex that there is almost no way one could self host that (even for just one user) without that being ones job. So one needs to make a distinction between something being open source and being feasible to use/maintain.

  In the end I gave up with Zotero. Even though it could have replaced Obsidian Notes, Calibre and Syncthing all at once for me.

• by jchw on 11/9/24, 1:42 PM

  I appreciate this effort. I've definitely been interested in how plausible it would be to, today, run another instance of the Bluesky AppView, mainly because AT proto seems promising, but to really meet it's full potential it needs independent operators with different sensibilities.

  I've been thinking a lot about the relay, though. 4.5 terabytes is, well... A lot, to say the least. If Bluesky grows 100x larger, running a relay will become pretty insanely expensive. I guess if the Bluesky organization remains fairly neutral about the relay part, it's not a huge deal, but:

  - It always eventually becomes hard to stay neutral. Eventually someone will get mad at something going through your network that isn't just obvious network abuse like SPAM.

  - It seems like drinking from the firehouse itself will eventually become expensive. Will it be possible for something this high bandwidth to remain freely-accessible?

• by 98codes on 11/8/24, 5:48 PM

  This is all academic for me until Bluesky gets the functionality to get an account back onto their main network, for DR if not peace of mind that an "undo" is possible.

• by __justplaying on 11/8/24, 2:24 PM

  author here, should you have questions!

• by ck2 on 11/8/24, 6:35 PM

  I found it interesting it's almost impossible, very difficult to get real Bluesky stats

  This site tries but has limits:

  * https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats

  They broke 14 million yesterday and it seems to be snowballing now since the election:

  * https://bsky.app/profile/jaz.bsky.social/post/3laetwhztdk2x

• by heavensteeth on 11/8/24, 6:02 PM

  This site is extremely snappy. Good work.

• by mdaniel on 11/8/24, 8:41 PM

  Also, yesterday someone posted[1] https://frontpage.fyi/ which seems like it's predominately Bluesky/ATprotocol news but since both of those interest me, if this blog link interests you then so might that link. It logs in with Bsky oauth2 federation

  1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42081210

• by jazzyjackson on 11/8/24, 6:39 PM

  Is it feasible to run a bluesky instance "on prem" and "offline" for instance as an airgapped corporate intranet ?

• by nisten on 11/8/24, 8:13 PM

  Is the actual guide just this <400 word thing, or is it all those 15 different links on the post, or only some of them....

  Does that... bureaucracy of documentation not infuriate anyone else or is it just me. I guess I'll try and reset my password to bluesky website, assuming it's this .app one, but then it's asking me to maybe select a provider ... of my password.

  Does whoemever made this user experience not have enough emotional intelligence realize how infuriating it is?

• by __justplaying on 11/8/24, 5:04 PM

  How do I ask the mods to swap out the link to the actual post instead of my blog's front page?

  (...also, the title, as the original has the caveat)

• by elfprince13 on 11/8/24, 9:29 PM

  but I thought that Bluesky wasn't meaningfully distributed /s