In my opinion, that is a worthy YSK because people don’t know that they can view and interact with Bluesky content without giving your data to an American for-profit entity.
In my opinion, that is a worthy YSK because people don’t know that they can view and interact with Bluesky content without giving your data to an American for-profit entity.
The way ATproto works is all your data is stored in a database called a PDS, every post, reply etc. unlike Mastodon or Lemmy, this PDS isn’t a part of an “instance” like Lemmy.world, and it doesn’t actually matter who hosts it. You could host the PDS yourself.
BlueSky is not an instance, it’s an “AppView” which is just a predefined set of rules/API, and it expects certain data in your PDS to look a certain way, and then to simplify a bit it just pulls the data out of your PDS and everyone else’s PDS all over the internet. The thing OP linked to is a Client that connects to the BlueSky AppView. But all the data still just lives in whatever PDS you store your data in. So if BlueSky disappeared tomorrow, you could write another AppView that just has to fit the same schema that the data in your PDS uses and it’d be like it never left.
To simplify further, if Mastodon and Lemmy work like Email, ATproto words like RSS. Your PDS is like your own hosted blog. Bluesky is like an RSS reader that just reads everyone’s PDS data. If the RSS reader vanishes, your data is still there, you just have to make a new RSS reader to read the data
Thanks for coming down to my level, appreciate it :)
Oh yeah it’s not just you, ATproto is very different from our usual way of thinking. Took me a bit to wrap my head around it at first too