Bluesky offloads storage to third parties

This architecture matters because it lets Bluesky avoid being the only company paying to store every post, image, and follow on the network. In AT Protocol, each account lives on a Personal Data Server, and those servers can be run by Bluesky or by outside operators. As the network grew past 26 million accounts, Bluesky redesigned relay infrastructure to stop requiring a full mirror of all repository data, which directly cut disk and processing load at network scale.

• AT Protocol splits the stack into PDS, relays, and app views. The PDS holds a user’s signed repository, relays pass updates along, and app views build the aggregated timeline and search experience. That separation means storage and syncing can be distributed, instead of one company owning the entire backend end to end.
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• The practical comparison is Mastodon. Mastodon also distributes hosting across many servers, and operators bear their own compute, storage, and moderation costs. Official Mastodon guidance notes server costs can range from a few hundred euros per year to several thousand, showing how federation pushes infrastructure expense outward to instance operators.
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• The strategic payoff is that Bluesky can turn pieces of the shared infrastructure into products. Once third parties run their own PDS infrastructure, Bluesky can sell paid relay, indexing, moderation, and identity services on top, which looks less like a pure consumer social app and more like WordPress style hosting plus network services.
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Going forward, the more activity that shifts onto independent PDS operators and service providers, the more Bluesky can scale users without scaling costs linearly. That creates room for a stronger business model, where the company earns from operating key services for the network rather than carrying the full infrastructure bill itself.