OH
can someone explain to me how blueskys protocol works
it looks so fuckin complicated and seemingly nobody online has made it easy to understand yet
what is a pds. what is a relay. where does zhe lexicon come into zhings. what zhe heck is going on

all ive figured out is zhe url in your username is basically entirely distinct from Everyzhing Else Going On except also it isnt

@mynotaurus from my very basic understanding:

• the pds (personal data server) is where the data for a user is stored, like a server in mastodon, and like how there’s a ton of users on mastodon.social there’s a ton of users on bsky.social.
• relays are how pds’s federate, like how activitypub crawls other websites, except without the crawling because all pds’s send messages to any relay they’re connected to, which is afaik the main noticeable difference between atproto and activitypub.
• the lexicon is basically an app-defined activitystream afaik but I’m not too sure on that one either, idk anything about lexicons or activitystreams lmao

@vn ahhh yeah zhat explains why federated servers all died when zhe One Big Relay went down

@mynotaurus oh also the handle is basically where a link to your DID can be found, and the DID document in question links to the PDS that’s being used so atproto-capable apps can target it

(username).bsky.social has a text file to a did:plc at (username).bsky.social/.well-known/atproto-did, which has an associated document on https://plc.directory to determine where the account’s PDS is located, the DID is the actual identity of the user and the handle is just an alias to that document

for a non-default one you need to add stuff to the domain host and/or https .well-known directory to discover where the specific user’s DID can be found, either by did:plc (the default, centralized to https://plc.directory) or did:web (an alternate method very few people use, like me, centralized to DNS like websites in general), but basically proving domain ownership is the bsky equivalent to the rel=me method of verification on activitypub/mastodon