Waag moved its whole Bluesky account to a European server, and nothing broke
In Bluesky's protocol your posts and followers live on a personal data server, not the app. Waag moved that server from US infrastructure to Europe's Eurosky, keeping its account intact — to prove the exit door actually opens.
Waag migrated its Bluesky data to Eurosky, an EU-based host, using an 'EU-Haul' service. Because AT Protocol stores your posts on a movable personal data server, the account, history and followers came along.
The thread's flip: this buys portability, not privacy. A Bluesky-using engineer notes AT Protocol replicates everything publicly by design — 'there's no privacy at all.'
Moving a Bluesky account without leaving Bluesky
Waag moved its Bluesky presence to Eurosky, a European host, using an "EU-Haul" migration service, and the point is what didn't break. In Bluesky's AT Protocol, your posts and identity live on a PDS (personal data server), not inside the app. Move the PDS and your account, history and followers come with it, the way email survives switching providers. Eurosky hosts PDSes under EU law, pitching transparency, privacy and digital sovereignty against US-based storage.
Waag's stated reason is less about features than funding. It argues Bluesky's venture-capital, shareholder structure sits at odds with real decentralisation: investors expect returns and influence, and Bluesky the company still writes most of the protocol and runs core moderation. Migrating the PDS is a small, concrete way to prove the exit door opens.
The thread: this proves portability, not privacy
The correction that reframes the whole move: nothing here is private. A retired software engineer who is himself on Bluesky spelled out what AT Protocol actually does.
"AT proto is about making data available to the public via replication. There's no privacy at all, but it's useful for some things. Hacker News comments don't have any privacy either." — a retired engineer active on Bluesky
A sharper version of that warning called the design a gift to surveillance, since public replication makes every post trivially collectable; the looser, less reliable federation of Mastodon is, one commenter argued, ironically safer. Why is a move painless? A well-known engineer gave the clean answer: a follow is a record in your own repository, so it does not matter which app or server you clicked it from.
"Follows work independent of which app you're using, so it works either way." — Steve Klabnik
Not everyone bought the anti-VC framing. A Bluesky user pushed back that the internet, DNS and the web were largely built by VC-backed companies, and that wanting more VC startups on open protocols — ideally in Europe — is the right lesson, not the wrong one. A counter came from a heavyweight account arguing the opposite:
"most of the stack should be non profit driven whenever possible to prevent the eventual enshittification... Internet Archive? Non profit. Let's Encrypt? Non profit. ICANN? Non profit." — a commenter with 100k+ karma
Underneath the sovereignty talk, the thread turned practical: contractors report real, paid demand for hauling EU public-sector systems off US clouds. One has spent 18 months rebuilding AWS features on OVH for a client near the European Space Agency. Data portability, it turns out, is becoming a business.
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