If you’re trying to self host your account, you follow https://atproto.com/guides/self-hosting

If you’re trying to build an application, you follow https://atproto.com/guides/applications

If you’re looking to run the bluesky application, you need to run the codebases in https://github.com/bluesky-social.

If mastodon.social shuts down tomorrow, my own instance continues to operate fully independently.

For PDS is that true? If bsky.app shuts down, will my PDS be able to function as an independent instance incl the web frontend etc.?

A PDS is an independent data store of everything you’ve done with atproto. If bsky.app shuts down, and you’ve self hosted your PDS (or created one and migrated your records over by replaying them from the network) you could spin up your own copy of bsky and continue on as normal.

The main caveat to this currently is that someone would have to run an alternative to https://plc.directory, and everyone else would have to agree which one to switch to. I'll be a lot more comfortable with atproto once the directory has moved to a non profit like ICANN (as @pfraze mentions), or a different DID method gains wide adoption.

Is this a thing that is easily discoverable in settings where people can choose to use a different directory? OR is this buried and hard to find or know it could be a thing?

It's currently built into the applications, not configurable by default. It's preferable if everybody in a thread / space / community uses the same one because otherwise differences can cause validation failures and conflict and thus break threads, resulting in that people can't follow many discussions, thus applications don't really expose it.

It's the kind of thing where it's preferable that either everybody switch at once, or that new applications with different "lexicon" (post types / social media format) picks a new default from the start.

That's too bad, it made me think if there were easy to switch user perferences then it would be truly decentralized..

Is there a way to clone the app and make this easy to find as a button to switch?

(unfamiliar with the licensing and the app in general, some things I have seen make me excited that it's possible to be uncensored and decentralized, then things like this come up and I wonder if I should put time into it or something else to promote)

Everything is open source so yes you can, it's mostly a question of practicality.

There's already third party clients, account hosting servers, etc, as well as different apps building on the same system (and which can use the same accounts and data store!) like blogs and more. Most devs are trying to coordinate their custom extensions so it doesn't cause conflict.

If it weren't coordinated we'd easily end up in the same place as Mastodon with their spurious server blocks where large parts of conversations are broken for most users.

I'd love more info about "Mastodon with their spurious server blocks where large parts of conversations are broken for most users." - who and why that happens and what it looks like to the different users that have servers blocked or what not.. is it clear they are missing messages that are from blocked servers?

Yeah this is a good point, I was thinking purely about those two parts of the service, but if bsky is gone, then plc.directory would be too. Thanks.

Thanks, it's been a while since I last looked into it.

Will my self-hosted account be able to talk directly to other self-hosted BlueSky accounts?

Yep!

and will a bunch of hostile feminists be able to place derogatory "labels" on my self hosted account or put me on nasty and rudely named lists branding me a right winger or a transmysoginist or whatever like they currently do on bluesky?

If you are any of those things, it doesn't hurt to warn others! hth

My understanding is that users and third-parties can offer various moderation services that users can subscribe to.

So anyone can label/mislabel/ban/block anyone else, but everyone can chose whose labels/mislabels/bans/blocks to follow

If you want to dedicate a VM to it, bsky Personal Data Server has a pretty easy install

https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds