Justin Garrison Walks Through Running Your Own Bluesky Personal Data Server — on a Raspberry Pi

Microblogging service Bluesky is enjoying an explosion of interest, absorbing many of those leaving the social network formally known as Twitter — and Justin Garrison has published a video demonstrating how to use a Raspberry Pi or other single-board computer to run a local Personal Data Server (PDS) for the platform.

"Bluesky has been having a moment for the last month or two, which has been exciting," Garrison explains, referring to the microblogging platform which began as an internal experimentation into decentralized social networking at Jack Dorsey's Twitter in 2019. "[A] PDS is […] where your data is stored. Whenever you're posting stuff, it's where it actually goes."

All social network services have somewhere the data is stored, but BlueSky differs from many by allowing the users themselves to run a personal PDS — part of the decentralization promised by the platforms' AT Protocol, though still relying on Bluesky's centralized servers for most of the work. That brings advantages and disadvantages: you can't run your own private BluSky instance, like you could a Mastodon or other ActivityPub instance — but it also means that a PDS is lightweight, and can easily be run via a home internet connection on a low-cost single-board computer like a Raspberry Pi.

"[Mine] is a [Raspberry] Pi 5, and I am going to be using an NVMe [Non-Volatile Memory Express] drive, but you can do it with a standard Raspberry Pi 3 [Model B+] with an SD Card," Garrison explains. "Some of the steps might be a little slower to download stuff, but the scraping and data — actually how it gets aggregated into Bluesky — shouldn't matter that much how slow your server is where you're running it."

The full guide is available in the video embedded above and on Garrison's YouTube channel; the PDS container images and documentation are available on Bluesky's GitHub repository under dual MIT and Apache 2.0 licensing.