Install it and use it?

Their PDS is self hosted, but it does still rely on the central relays (though you COULD host that yourself if you wanted to pay for it, I suppose?).

It's very centralized, but it's not that different from what you'd have to do to make Mastodon useful: a small/single user instance will get zero content, even if you follow a lot of people, without also adding several relays to work around some of the design decisions made by the Mastodon team regarding replies and how federation works for those kind of things, as well as to populate hashtags and searches and such.

Though really you shouldn't do any of that, and just use a good platform for discussion, like a forum or a threadiverse platform. (No seriously, absolutely hate "microblog" shit because it's designed to just be zingers and hot takes and not actual meaningful conversations.)

all you have to do is

1. host your own PDS, where your account lives, this is easy, I do it myself already.

2. host you own appview: the only actually good appview is bsky's, luckily it's open source, unfortunately I do not believe they made it easy to self-host.

3. Host a relay, this isn't all that hard, it just needs a real big server (AFAIK it needs a shitton of io throughput), so unless you're very rich it's not too realistic to host this.

So yeah, a PDS is easy to host but the other two parts are a pain, and since the protocol has only been open for a few months, people haven't really done too much.

Frontpage exists, but they haven't made it be able to interact with bsky.Social, although the accounts are shared. I have been told by people involved with that that that's an issue with frontpage's implementation, and not the AT protocol

My guess is Bluesky never intended to be « open » and « federated » and « decentralized « as we understand it