A pds can do a lot more than people suggest, but its not very effective.
Essentially, atproto has three distinct parts:
A PDS, stores your posts, user, and handles authentication
A relay, crawls every pds, and creates a “firehose” of data to build stuff with
An AppView, an app built with data from the relay. bsky.app is an appview, flushes.app is another. whtwnd.com is a blogging appview
The relay is the main “centralised” part of the network, but its possible to use the network without it. whtwnd, for example, crawls PDSs directly, without a relay.
A pds can do a lot more than people suggest, but its not very effective.
Essentially, atproto has three distinct parts:
The relay is the main “centralised” part of the network, but its possible to use the network without it. whtwnd, for example, crawls PDSs directly, without a relay.
There’s more to it, but thats the basics.