Also at:// URIs are of the form at://DID/..., and your human readable handle is bound to your DID through DNS TXT records _atproto.roshangeorge.dev, but applications all know to render that as just roshangeorge.dev. That DID points to a document that specifies where your server lives, so the HTTPS/WSS routes can live wherever you want them to.

Also likes/replies/etc on your posts go in their authors repos not yours, your intuition is correct there.

These are used throughout the system, for example if you look at the output of a feed generator, its just a list of these URIs

As the guy developing said feed, this is indeed the reason. I have a hard enough time as it is with people gaming the specific parameters of the feed, having it fully open would be a huge tax on my time.

Most of the components of the feed are trialed in my personal feeds repo here: https://github.com/whyrusleeping/algoz

You could take the code from there and get to a workable "Discover" feed relatively quickly if you wanted to. Also several of the feeds I have in that repo are among the most popular feeds in the network, especially Quiet Posters (infrequent.go).

The Kinda part is that your identity by default is backed by a DID that delegates authority to specific keypairs. The keypair that your PDS uses to sign is included in there automatically, but on account creation you can currently set a backup keypair that allows you to manually sign identity operations.

From a technical perspective the architecture is very similar to Twitter or other social networks internally, just pieced apart with some cryptography added to allow different components to not have to fully trust eachother. Thats to say, the components individually scale the same as twitter does (probably better tbh, we’re building this with 2023 tech not 2005 tech). Im happy to dive into that more but I actually dont think the technology is the hard part.

The bulk of the work is culture and community building and maintenance. One of the biggest things we’ve been focused on getting right is moderation, and the federated architecture helps a lot here. Allowing “third party” labeling to be integrated into the experience seamlessly allows communities to choose their own way of curating their experience. Instead of relying on a single company to dictate “the rules” you just pick “the rules” you want and go from there. There’s obviously a lot more to it, so id encourage you to check out some of our other blog posts: https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog