AT protocol doesn't federate the way ActivityPub does. There are separations between how your dat is stored, how it is aggregated, how it is filtered, and how it is displayed. Each part can be hosted separately and federate differently with separate instances of each part. The aggregation part is the thing that is most critical and there are probably some limited independent instances of that, but BlueSky has offered no support in facilitating this beyond making their peices AT Protocol compliant. You van take what BlueSky built and try to run your own instance of the aggregation service but they provide no documentation or support. You could also build your own, but that's difficult and I don't think anyone is trying.

So it is federated, but pretty much no one is interested in doing the work to federate with the primary infrastructure.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

It's not hard to find out. It uses their own AT protocol. I don't know if there's a list but if I open the app, pretty much everyone I see is running on a federated server...

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

Well, what's a popular server? Are there several big ones? Sorry, but I really don't understand why the answer isn't turning up in web search results.

PS: Are you sure it isn't just people who've done the "set your domain as your handle" thing but even so are still on the central one? Because even if they have made some small progress towards decentralization they absolutely have not gone so far that there isn't still a central one.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 days ago

Further searching turns up the information that "federated" Bluesky PDS instances are limited to ten user accounts each, and API usage limits which may constrain things further. So that would explain why there aren't any big ones.

So far as I can tell they do all still "federate" through the central server, not directly with each other. So there being not much point in it may also explain why it hasn't caught on.

Almost as bad as Threads, really.