I’ve moved my Bluesky account to Eurosky. If you follow me on Bluesky, then you probably won’t have noticed any difference, as everything will have migrated over.
Eurosky is a PDS (Personal Data Server) for the Atmosphere, which is the system of interoperable social media services that Bluesky uses. As the name suggests, it’s based in Europe, and so my personal data is stored somewhere with more closely aligned privacy laws to the UK.
Signing up for Eurosky
Eurosky opened for registrations last month, and is now home to a few thousand users. You can create a fresh account there, or you can migrate an existing account from Bluesky (or indeed any other app in the Atmosphere). I did the latter, and used their EU-HAUL tool to migrate my account. It took around 20 minutes in total. I previously tried the PDS MOOver tool, but this failed for some reason.
Once the migration was complete, I just needed to log out of my deactivated Bluesky account, and then log in using my Eurosky account. You can still use the official Bluesky app and web interface, so there’s no change to the user experience.
I use my domain as my username, and so my username remains the same after the migration. If you don’t have your own domain, then your username will change from [something].bsky.social to [something].eurosky.social.
Alternative PDSs
There are a few other PDSs coming online now. Blacksky is aimed at black people and is based in the US. Cory Doctorow is using one where he is the only user (he previously resisted joining Bluesky until now). In time, I imagine Atmosphere PDSs will become a bit like Mastodon instances, where there will be lots of small servers that people can run themselves, as well as the core Bluesky instance. Indeed, the Atmosphere is essentially analogous to the Fediverse, and the underlying AT Protocol works in a similar way to ActivityPub. A WordPress plugin called Wireservice is in development.
This is all very geeky stuff and I’m sure most Bluesky users will stay put on the Bluesky PDS. But I feel more comfortable using a service like Eurosky which is in a more closely aligned jurisdiction to me.
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