An appview is really just a service for hydrating content in the skeleton of posts that feeds return back to give to the user. The only things they do other th

An appview is really just a service for hydrating content in the skeleton of posts that feeds return back to give to the user. The only things they do other than feed hydration are track notifications, (optionally) provide a search engine, (optionally) provide a CDN, and (temporarily until E2EE rolls out) handle DMs. So you can actually do things like the Red Dwarf [1] project which is a bluesky client without an appview. It's slower, you visibly notice request loading/pop-in, there's no notifications, and no search but it works with any other bluesky appview (since appviews are basically a lens into atproto rather than an independent service). -------- If you wanted to run your own infrastructure, instead you'd probably want to run your own PDS. Running an appview has its benefits of course but the main way you "self host" is to run a PDS. That's fairly trivial and people have run them on all kinds of constrained hardware (including a literal jailbroken microwave if I remember correctly). 1. https://tangled.sh/@whey.party/red-dwarf https://tangled.sh/@whey.party/red-dwarf