Leaflet, Pckt, Offprint, And The Rest Of The Atproto-verse Of Platforms

Belonging to the third order of laymen, I still don't understand how this atproto universe of platforms work. They all interact with each other just as the Bluesky and other atproto apps do with each other. But somehow they let you post much larger word counts and much more images than the twitter-like constraints of Bluesky allow. They're all still linked to Bluesky in some manner, seeing as they all ask you to subscribe using your Bluesky, ahem, your atmosphere username. The Bluesky logo is ever present though.

From what I understand, they are all able to add to and modify data from the servers in which we have an account, which all of them are able to access. By having made a profile in Bluesky, I have an account in their servers, and the content on this server space is able to be modified by platforms other than Bluesky.

As to how much storage a single user is able to utilise in the Bluesky server... I don't know? I assume it has a limit? My main question and concern has been regarding where exactly all the content we create is stored? Leaflet lets you create posts without even having to sign in! Where the heck do they end up?

A younger and more naive version of me was led to believe that the "Cloud" was something vague and aether-like that existed in the space between computers, someplace where storage is limitless and unconstrained by the physical limitations of hardware. How impressionable and prone to propaganda the young mind is. Becoming aware of how that miracle technology works has led much moderation in how much of myself I put out there into the wide expanse of the internet, especially when it's for free.

The discovery of Leaflet.pub and its offer of unlimited blogs rang all sorts of warning bells in my head. Nothing is ever truly free and you are the product and all. Rather more convincingly, Offprint only lets you to create one free blog before asking you to pay more. Pckt works this way too but with the additional caveat of only 15 blog posts per month and a 5gb limit (Why? Are the posts stored on their own servers? I'm missing something here). The account-less page creation feature rubs me the wrong way in the light of all this. There's a plethora of other platforms that I still haven't checked out. I just now discovered an atproto based RSS feed, FeatherReader that stores its feed in the PDS (the PDS is essentially your Bluesky username the way I understand it). How does that work? All of this is running on this seemingly miraculous technology, this cornucopia that is the atprotocol or the PDS or the atmosphere.

I recently came across the blog, or rather the portfolio of a photographer who had transferred all his works over to his blog on Leaflet. Apparently he has hosted all his stuff on a server that's not the Bluesky one. However upon checking the company that hosts his server, it appeared that they do it as part of an app similar to Bluesky that is also able to browse the atprotocol. They do charge you money to use their server however. So is it viable to do a similar exercise using Bluesky's servers? How much strain am I putting on them if I were to ever upload an enormous amount of images or files onto my atproto blog?

I understand - and tell myself - that most of this is because I still don't understand how the technology works. The analogies that I've made for myself are insufficient to give me a proper understanding of it. And I sorely want to understand it, to interact with it. To somehow integrate that RSS reader into my KOReader and have it fetch articles from it instead of needing to add every single rss link to every single device. However I'm not a tech developer or a programmer, and I have little time in my daily life to put in the effort to understand everything.

And so my interactions with these platforms will remain of a casual nature until I feel confident in having developed a serious enough understanding of how it works. A blog post or two here and a fanfic there. For now.

PS: This is my first post, and this was supposed to be a simple session of checking out the Pckt.blog site. The key smashing began to take a pattern however and wow did I end up writing a lot. Although still only worth 3 minutes of reading.