Did you know? You can self-host and/or mirror almost all of Bluesky's infrastructure today!
This article assumes familiarity with the architecture of Bluesky, general *nix knowledge and basic knowledge of TypeScript, Go and Rust toolchains
PDS
The most obvious one: having your own PDS and owning your data. You can find the GitHub repository with instructions here; you can migrate your existing account with the GOAT tool, for which Bryan Newbold has written an excellent howto post.
Relay
Bryan has a great blog post on how to set up your own Relay right here. Things have grown since, so make sure you have at least ~4.5 TB of disk space (maybe more). Two important comments, not in the post: make sure to use the --disk-persister-dir=/data/events flag as well as enable compaction.
Jetstream
Jetstream is like having your own Relay firehose, but uses a fraction of the bandwidth, storage, and gives you friendly JSON instead of CBOR-encoded MST blocks. After cloning the GitHub repository, you can either use the included docker-compose.yaml with make up or build it directly with make build and use your favorite keep-this-process-running-pretty-please tool (systemd, pm2 etc.) Don't forget to take a look at the available CLI arguments/env variables, which let you do things like change the default retention (24 hours) or override the Firehose cursor and backfill it with 3 days of data—which is what's available from the official relays.
plc.directory mirror
To get a mirror of plc.directory, with almost all users on Bluesky (they do support did:web, but they are few and far between), clone str4d's plc repo, switch to the mirror branch, run cargo run --features mirror -- mirror run mirror.db, then sit back and wait 5-10 hours. Once it's done and up-to-date, you have a full replica in a neat sqlite3 DB. You can monitor its status with something like watch -n60 'sqlite3 mirror.db "select count(*) from identity;"' in a tmux pane.
The official web/mobile app, also known as social-app
Clone the repo, run yarn && yarn web, and you have a fully-functional copy of it in mere minutes that you can modify to your heart's desire. Doing this on mobile is a lot more involved and documented here.
AppView
The elephant in the room is, of course, running your own Bluesky AppView. If you're interested, DM me on Bluesky to join my working group to make it happen!
