You normally don't notice tbh. Switching PDS is entirely invisible to the frontend. There's a lot of self hosted PDS users (since it's basically a small go router + sqlite) but there's also bigger community PDS projects being spun up including blacksky and northsky.

As for frontends, there's a bunch of them and a lot of them focus on changing the UX. But for self hosted "bluesky", there is https://deer.social which is a forked client that still relies on the bluesky appview/backend and there is https://zeppelin.social which is downstream of deer social but also runs their own appview independent of "big bluesky".

Thanks for the explanation, I was almost certain I'm missing something.

> Do you know anyone who does?

One example of a profile that lives on a different PDS ("AT Protocol Personal Data Server") than the default one: https://bsky.app/profile/mackuba.eu

If you look in the bottom left of https://clearsky.app/mackuba.eu/history, it shows:

> User changed [...] 1/2/2025 to external server PDS: https://lab.martianbase.net

If you go to that URL, you'll see the landing page for the atproto PDS software.

Edit: Ah, and seems Kuba is hosting a directory of profiles using their own PDS as well, lots of examples over there: https://blue.mackuba.eu/directory/pdses

Biggest one right now (excluding the default one) seems to be atproto.brid.gy, which has 40393 accounts.