Tranquil PDS
A Personal Data Server for the AT Protocol.
Bluesky runs on a federated protocol called AT Protocol. Your account lives on a PDS, a server that stores your posts, profile, follows, and cryptographic keys. Bluesky hosts one for you at bsky.social, but you can run your own. Self-hosting means you control your data; you're not dependent on any company's servers, and your account + data is actually yours.
This particular PDS thrives under harsh conditions. It is a dandelion growing through the cracks in the sidewalk concrete.
It has full compatibility with Bluesky's reference PDS: same endpoints, same behavior, same client compatibility. Everything works: repo operations, blob storage, firehose, OAuth, handle resolution, account migration, the lot.
Another excellent PDS is Cocoon, written in go.
What's different about Tranquil PDS
This software isn't an afterthought by a company with limited resources.
It is a superset of the reference PDS, including: passkeys and 2FA (WebAuthn/FIDO2, TOTP, backup codes, trusted devices), did:web support (PDS-hosted subdomains or bring-your-own), multi-channel communication (email, discord, telegram, signal) for verification and alerts, granular OAuth scopes with a consent UI showing human-readable descriptions, app passwords with granular permissions (read-only, post-only, or custom scopes), account delegation (letting others manage an account with configurable permission levels), automatic backups to s3-compatible object storage (configurable retention and frequency, one-click restore), and a built-in web UI for account management, OAuth consent, repo browsing, and admin.
The PDS itself is a single small binary with no node/npm runtime. It does require postgres, valkey, and s3-compatible storage, which makes setup heavier than the reference PDS's sqlite. The tradeoff is that these are battle-tested pieces of infra that we already know how to scale, back up, and monitor.
Quick Start
cp .env.example .env
podman compose up -d
just run
Configuration
See .env.example for all configuration options.
Development
Run just to see available commands.
just test
just lint
Production Deployment
Quick Deploy (Docker/Podman Compose)
Edit .env.prod with your values. Generate secrets with openssl rand -base64 48.
cp .env.prod.example .env.prod
podman-compose -f docker-compose.prod.yml up -d
Installation Guides
| Guide | Best For |
|---|---|
| Debian | Debian 13+ with systemd |
| Alpine | Alpine 3.23+ with OpenRC |
| OpenBSD | OpenBSD 7.8+ with rc.d |
| Containers | Podman with quadlets or OpenRC |
| Kubernetes | You know what you're doing |
Thanks
This project is very grateful to @nel.pet, @nonbinary.computer, @juli.ee, @mary.my.id, and @baileytownsend.dev for their help and their code to lean on.
License
AGPL-3.0-or-later. Documentation is CC BY-SA 4.0. See LICENSE for details.