---
title: "Bluesky’s AT Protocol as I Understand It"
permalink: /:title/
description: "Why I think there's reasonable apprehension around the new social protocol"
category: technology
---

My attempt to explain [AT Protocol](https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/atproto) to a 5y.o. — confirmed as [“looks correct”](https://bsky.app/profile/danabra.mov/post/3la34iwphxk2i) by [dan](https://bsky.app/profile/danabra.mov). 😅

Personal Data Servers (PDS) are for common folk. Very lightweight, easy to set up. You own your stuff.

The big-world central Bluesky app / aggregator is for those that has the resource to run them: infra, moderation, manpower.

Maybe think of how Google search can pull public info from different sites and you can interact with them...

At some point other big-world aggregators can pop up (Bing, DuckDuckGo?) and we would probably need them

Currently PDSes by themselves don’t give us a way to interact, we need such big-world aggregators for that

Hence, the difficulty of seeing this network as a decentralized platform

That said, what they mean by it “taking inspiration from The Web” — is how Big Tech (in terms of resources) has owned the decentralized design of the Web via consolidation of information and controlling how we interact

Now the question is: what have we learned from that kind of Web?
