That’s like saying that someone using Google Reader doesn’t “experience federation of RSS”.
Yes, my experience using the Bluesky app includes the Bluesky app server aggregating from many independent PDS hosts (because people I follow like that). But it doesn’t show up in user experience because that’s the whole point.
And yes, I can use another aggregator instead of the Bluesky app, or even use a client which has no backend and relies on community-run Constellation index. It all roughly works the same.
And it works as smoothly for people on other app servers?
What does “people on other app servers” mean? That’s not a thing.
App servers are aggregators. You can use any to read the network. Here’s a post I wrote, as seen via Bluesky aggregator:
https://bsky.app/profile/danabra.mov/post/3mol3gyikac2d
A second later, I could see the same post via the Blacksky community aggregator: https://blacksky.community/profile/did:plc:fpruhuo22xkm5o7tt...
Here’s the same post on pdsls which reads it directly from my hosting: https://pdsls.dev/at://did:plc:fpruhuo22xkm5o7ttr2ktxdo/app....
My hosting is managed by Bluesky but it has nothing to do with Bluesky app. Hosting is a separate decoupled thing. I could move hosting to my own Docker container, and all aggregators would see my posts just as fine.
Does this clear things up?