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".
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".