My muscle memory is far too ingrained 😭

On bluesky/atproto, your handle is a hostname and is only recognized valid if you control that hostname. Basically the same as rel=me except it’s a .well-known file instead of a html tag

This was true for a while but they’re updating the sync protocol to support sharding etc. people are running full network relays off a raspberry pi

The authentication parts uses a standard w3c developed format called DID. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_identifier it’s basically a more general form of a url that must point to a specially formatted file. There are several did methods. atproto supports did:web which stores the doc at a user-set http URL path, and also did:PLC which stores the doc in a special database controlled by bsky. They plan (hopefully) add more methods in the future.

But yeah, the currently supported did:web authentication method is fully independent of bsky inc

To be fair, this is pretty similar to the way American press covered the rise of German fascism at the time

🌎👨‍🚀🔫👨‍🚀