What about the PDS ?

I tried to simplify the ATProto model somewhat. People often ask, “What about the federation?” or “Where is my data?” With this model, I tried to draw a comparison with Gravatar. This comparison helped me understand the system a little better a few months ago.

The Gravatar

A Gravatar has proven to have the great advantage that you don't have to upload your photo to different platforms, but can store it on the servers of gravatar.com. In a broader sense, this gives you ownership of your photo. You no longer have to save it on different websites. That's the practical understanding.

Of course, a Gravatar still has the disadvantage that the server on which it is stored does not belong to you. Nevertheless, the comparison seems to me to be useful in order to approach the idea of a PDS, which is essentially inherent in atproto.

It is important to note that the personal profiles managed by Gravatar are linked to Gravatar’s servers, whereas the Personal Data Server can be managed anywhere, even on your own home system.

There are plenty of blog files available with detailed explanations; this is only intended as a supplement and a first step towards a better understanding.

Traditional social media

In the traditional understanding of social media, your data is stored on the respective websites, which belong to large companies and corporations. If you violate the corporations' guidelines or if decisions are made within the corporations that you cannot support and you log out of the platform, you will lose all your data. In addition, when you transfer your data to this platform, you may transfer your rights to these companies, and they may use your data, such as vacation photos, to train their AI or sell it to third parties.

The idea of a personal data server

The idea of a personal data server (PDS), on the other hand, is that companies and corporations can of course make offers or provide good Internet products, but there is no longer any dependency. The data is stored on your personal data server.

Your photos, texts, or data of any kind are no longer stored on the platforms and are not transferred to them (even legally). This means that you can switch platforms at will with this data if you don't like the platform's policy or if they make unacceptable decisions.