ATProto explained for a slightly "technical" audience

AppView: Retrieves stuff from a relay and does any app-specific preparation

Relay: Collects data from Personal Data Servers (PDSes)

App: Phone apps, web apps, fun little console gadgets. No real limit here.

The PDS is the real gem of ATProto. You log into apps through it, and it sends all your data, like posts and reviews and likes and videos, to your PDS for relays to collect.

How does this look in practice?

Check it out:

★★★★ review Knight Rider (2008)

An aggressively late 2000s thread runs through it with rapid 180 camera pans and overt sexuality beyond the norm just a decade before, but the core is still Knight Rider. Even the updated theme keeps it real. Worth watching if you can be patient through all the cheese.

What is classic anyway? - Foxes

Originally a thread on Bluesky

Each of those sits on my PDS. Currently, the PDS is run by Bluesky. I could do some stuff to make sure I could move even if Bluesky went evil. That process is complicated and I'd rather wait until I don't have to think about terms like rotation key or key management.

At the rate things are going, I expect all this to be solved with a good user experience some time in 2026. Hopefully by then there are managed PDS hosts where I can pay someone $5/month to run it for me, I can just keep my migration key or whatever in my password manager paired with a synced copy of my PDS in a private GitHub repo, and no one cares about Bluesky not having the PLC directory shuffled off to an independent org yet because there are 20 different credible mirrors.