[half-kh-hacker]

What else would "self-hosting all of Bluesky" mean other than a copy of the entire site? If you just want to participate in the network host a PDS, which only stores your own posts.

[nightpool]

Surely there's some middle ground between only hosting your own data and being reliant on another site to keep track of your following / followers and hosting a duplicate copy of the entire network?

[steveklabnik]

For sure. If you just want to host your own data, you can do that. A PDS for you and maybe some friends is very small and cheap to host.

[half-kh-hacker]

Your following list is stored in your own repo, so it lives on your PDS. You can theoretically have partial replicas of the network but nobody has bothered yet; if you want to make software like that, a good start would be subscribing to the firehose and filtering down to DIDs you care about / supplying the watched DIDs parameter to a Jetstream instance

[fiatjaf]

The middle ground you're looking for is impossible in the AT protocol, it is however what the Nostr protocol is aiming towards.