Bsky.storage: Own Your Social Identity

On November 20, 2003, Federal Communications Commission “Wireless Local Number Portability” rules granted residents of the United States a cherished right — the guarantee that we’d be able to move our phone numbers between carriers. This change came about because phone numbers had already become such a core part of the identities of people and companies around the world that without this right, phone companies would exercise effective monopoly power, able to enact any policies they chose without worrying that they’d lose customers.

Twenty-two years later, a new crop of monopolists have cornered the market on public identity. People and brands are locked into siloes, their content and followings inextricably tied to proprietary systems. Even when users are able to download their content, the backbreaking labor involved in rebuilding an audience on a new platform is a powerful disincentive to change. Unfortunately, even if “Social Media Portability” rules were enacted today, the technology and infrastructure to support them have not existed in a widely usable form… until now.

Storacha is excited to announce the launch of bsky.storage — a user-friendly way to take control of your social identity on the internet, built on Bluesky and the innovative new Social Internet platform that is the AT Protocol. bsky.storage lets you create hourly backups of your Bluesky content and create a “recovery key” that will enable you to take control of your Bluesky account even in the event that Bluesky is offline or captured by an evil billionaire with evil plans. Even if you’d like to keep using Bluesky’s Personal Data Servers, keeping your data backed up and ready to move whenever YOU choose will (we hope!) bring you peace of mind and a sense of control over the chaos that is modern life online.

“Our vision for the web is one where users own their data and online identities,” said Jay Graber, Founder of Bluesky. “Projects like this deliver that vision by helping users with independent account backups and recovery.”

bsky.storage was built to make that vision a reality — and it’s easy (and free) to get started. Every user gets 2GB of storage on our free tier, which is more than enough to back up years of content. And because Storacha uses content-addressed storage on the Filecoin Network, we never store the same data twice.

You can take control of your Bluesky account today by visiting bsky.storage and creating a Storacha account. To help us prevent fraud, we will need to either collect a credit card number or prove you’re a unique human using our Humanode-based identity verification process. Once you’re in you’ll be able to connect your Bluesky account, create a new Storacha storage space and choose what data you’d like to back up:

Once you create your backup, we’ll take a snapshot once an hour, saving any new “Media Blobs” and creating a full backup of your “Repository” if and only if it has changed:

Clicking on an individual snapshot will let you navigate to the repository and blob explorers or let you initiate the snapshot restore process — useful if you’d like to take your content for a spin on a new PDS or fully transfer your identity to a new host.

It’s important to note that as with any data uploaded to Storacha, we are unable to guarantee that your data will be fully removed from the Filecoin Network, the decentralized storage network that gives us strong data durability guarantees. For now, bsky.storage will only back up publicly available data that has likely already been backed up by the Internet Archive and other internet data hoarders, but in the interest of caution please do not use our backup service if you are worried that you may want to scrub your content from the internet in the future, as it will be an additional hurdle in that process.

Once you’ve created a backup, you can register a recovery key by heading over to the identity manager:

Keys start life without any special abilities, but we’ll walk you through the process of registering them as recovery keys and, when the time comes, taking control of your account and moving it to a new home:

Migrating to a new Personal Data Server won’t mean rebuilding your audience — Bluesky and the AT Protocol are designed to let you change your social media carrier without leaving your contacts behind, and Storacha’s bsky.storage gives you the peace of mind of knowing that you can change carriers at any time.

At Storacha, we believe in simple, purpose-built applications implemented in public. One hundred percent of the development of bsky.storage is done in public, and if you’d like to contribute or fix a bug we’d be grateful for your contributions to github.com/storacha/bluesky-backup-webapp-server. We’ve had some outstanding community contributors to the development of bsky.storage so far — deepest gratitude to https://github.com/kaf-lamed-beyt, https://github.com/Crosstons and https://github.com/badgooooor for helping us build and polish this app! In upcoming releases we’d like to give our users more options for creating and managing private keys, and are very interested in allowing users to store encrypted backups, which would allow bsky.storage users to back up their DMs and preferences as well — stay tuned!

If you’re building an app other than Bluesky on the AT Protocol, we’d love to talk to you about bundling automated backups into your subscriptions — because bsky.storage is implemented against the AT Protocol it comes with built-in support for any ATProto app.

The World Wide Web has always been about freedom — freedom to post, freedom to scroll, freedom to connect with your people on your terms. Step into your freedom on the Social Internet today with bsky.storage!