Hosting Provider option in Bluesky app (aka PDS)

[bmann.ca]

I’ve seen some people starting to get confused about selecting a “Hosting Provider” when logging in to the Bluesky web or mobile app.

TLDR; the Bluesky apps don’t yet support OAuth login, so you have to say what PDS your account is hosted on, in order to authenticate with the right server.

Sign In Screen

The sign in screen has a Hosting provider label that defaults to Bluesky Social. Click the pencil edit icon.

Choose your account provider

You get a modal dialog titled “Choose your account provider”, defaulted to Bluesky. This is the same screen that is part of Sign Up flow for new account creation.

Clicking on custom lets you enter in the address of where your PDS is hosted, e.g. blacksky.app.

Click done.

Sign in Screen (Custom hosting provider)

Now your custom hosting provider is filled in, and you can put in your username and password.

What does this do?

You are now logged into the Bluesky app with your hosting provider account. All of the Bluesky settings, default moderation, etc all apply. All of your content - Bluesky microblog posts, likes, blocks, etc - are stored in your account on your PDS.

Note as well that the flow for new account creation is similar: you can use the Bluesky app to create an account on a remote / custom PDS.

See this post for screenshots of that flow:

BringYourOwn.Computer (@computer.bringyourown.computer)

A link to a longer doc describing the relation of apps, moderation labelers, etc etc would be useful.

[bmann.ca]

Someone asked, so yes, you can do the same in reverse.

Go to https://blacksky.community/ and it will default to the Blacksky PDS. You can login with your Bluesky hosted PDS by entering in bsky.social.

[tynanpurdy.com]

Of note, all of this flow should effectively disappear as broader convention. Handle resolution (using your handle to figure you where your account is hosted) is solved. Proper UX would be to enter your handle, get taken to your PDS to log in, and get sent back to the app you were using. I eagerly await the day social-app supports OAuth.

[bmann.ca]

Of course. I’m documenting this because Bluesky functionally doesn’t have any user documentation, so I wrote this so I can link to it.

Apps that support OAuth just use a handle as the starting point (and don’t have a password field on their site at all).

[visionaire.visionairenet.org]

If you host your own PDS, you can log in to Atmophere via both Bsky.app and Blacksky.community. That was very interesting for me.

[tynanpurdy.com]

Indeed! Apps are really just clients to view stuff in your account and other’s accounts. Each app will show certain types of content and have their own policies. Any atproto account can be used with any client app.